The Aims and Scope
Interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly important in the academy. It is therefore notable that the growing discipline of disability studies is largely overlooked by the literary studies departments of the universities in, for example, Britain. After all, most of these undergraduate courses approach literary studies from theoretical perspectives that are appreciative of class, ethnicity and gender, so why is it that so few include a comparable approach that is appreciative of disability?
The founding principle of The Journal of Literary Disability is that this scenario is indicative of an institutionalised problem, for the curriculum deficiency has been legitimatised by a corresponding publication deficiency and vice versa. It follows, then, that the publication of literary criticism and theory that are appreciative of disability will help to enhance the literary studies curriculum. This inference is substantiated by the fact that the professor of English and disability studies Lennard Davis is featured alongside a number of internationally acclaimed feminist, Marxist and post-colonial literary critics in The Norton Anthology of Critical Theory, which is a standard text in the universities that have come to appreciate disability in the context of literary studies - most notably, the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Miami University, Ohio; Ohio State University; and the University of Leeds.
The curriculum deficiency in Britain and elsewhere is perplexing for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that there are few literary works that do not portray disability in one way or another. Be it poetry, drama, fiction or film, Classical, Biblical, Medieval, Renaissance, Restoration, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, Post-War or Post-Modern, literary disability can be found in every genre from every era, so why is it rarely met with informed criticism in the academy?
The deficiency is also perplexing because the discipline of literary studies is becoming more and more accessible to disabled undergraduates. Wheelchair access, talking lifts, interpreters, learning support workers, audio books, screen-reading software and so on are all indicative of a learning environment that welcomes disabled students. The trouble is that this welcome proves to be purely rhetorical if it does not extend to the course content. Why is the portrayal of disability ignored, while that of gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality is subjected to critical analysis?
One of the journal’s aims is to demonstrate that more than making the claims of inclusive Higher Education less rhetorical for disabled people, more than widening participation on a profound level, the integration of disability studies will enrich literary studies in general. Something of a precedent was set in the late twentieth century by the academy’s endorsement of the Marxist, feminist and postcolonial approaches that provided profound insights into literary constructs of the Self and Other. In the case of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for instance, critical approaches to the significance of class, ethnicity and gender were exemplified by Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar respectively, but what about disability? It is the journal’s contention that the resultant appreciation of this and the vast majority of literary works will be significantly enhanced by critical readings that are informed by disability studies.
As more and more scholars recognise that an appreciation of disability enhances the appreciation of literature, the gap alongside the feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches will become increasingly apparent. Indeed, it is intended that the articles, reviews and letters will demonstrate the ways in which the British taxonomy of approaches to literary studies can be supplemented by an approach that is appreciative of disability, thereby exposing what the late Jacques Derrida might have called an absence that requires supplementing.
Because this absence has already been supplemented elsewhere in the academy, another of the journal’s aims is to assist Interdisciplinarity between literary studies and disability studies by announcing and analysing events, programmes and initiatives from the field. It is hoped that the comments category will attract submissions from English departments that are beginning to introduce disability studies to the curriculum, as well as from those in which the interdisciplinarity is already established.
The Journal of Literary Disability has high aims indeed, but they can be achieved by literary scholars who act on the belief that impairment is an aspect of the human condition, like class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, from which it follows that disability studies should be recognised alongside Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism and psychoanalysis as a theoretical basis for literary criticism.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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