Cambridge Scholars Publishing The Poetics and Hermeneutics of Pain and Pleasure

Pain and pleasure are at the heart of human experiences and literary journeys. This book takes the title of Roland Barthes’s text on the pleasure of writing as a starting point for the discussion of other different wor(l)ds and cartographies of pain and pleasure. Set against the Aristotelian delineation of pleasure as the major principle that should govern a literary endeavor, this volume investigates alternative reflections on the themes of pleasure and pain. Thinking about the ways through which expressions of pain and pleasure may affect the writer and the reader as experiences of other pursuits of the human imagination can place or displace, soothe or enrage, and inspire or discourage the individual search for meaning. By engaging with different theories and expressions, it is possible to understand what pain and pleasure have done in the history of humanity, rather than merely looking at them as representations of others’ distant experiences. This volume entails new reflections on the expressions of pain and pleasure to create new meanings for these words in a world vying for expressions of power with and without bliss. About the Author Bootheina Majoul is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the High Institute of Languages of Tunis at the University of Carthage, Tunisia. She holds an MA in Cross Cultural Poetics from this institution and a PhD in English Literature/Letters from the Faculty of Manouba, Tunisia. She has published two books and several academic articles and poetry collections. Her most recent publications are: Terrorism in Literature: Examining a Global Phenomenon (2019), On History and Memory in Arab Literature and Western Poetics (2020), and Poetics of the Native (2021). Hanen Baroumi is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Tunis, Tunisia. She holds an MA in Cross-Cultural Poetics from the University of Carthage, Tunisia, and a PhD in Literature from the Faculty of Manouba, Tunisia. Her research interests are literary and cultural studies, North-African and Maghrebian literature, and women and gender studies.