Exemplary Courses
Disability in Literature and Culture
Thomas Couser (Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York)
This is a course about disability. It is not about disabled people as a distinct population but about disability as a cultural category. We will consider bodies in terms of their form and function; in particular, we will focus on bodies that represent extremes, rather than norms, of development.
We will be concerned with what sorts of bodies are taken for "normal," with how such norms are constructed, and with how and why "abnormal" or disabled bodies have traditionally been represented in literary texts. The overriding concerns of the course will be with how the body's shape and capacities have been assumed to determine character and fate and how physical and mental impairments have been used in literature to signify moral and psychological states. With more recent texts, we will be concerned with how representation may challenge conventional conceptions of "normality" and "disability." The goal of the course, then, will be to explore disability as a cultural construct like race and gender.
The course will not attempt an exhaustive chronological survey, but to provide a sense of perspective on contemporary American culture, readings will be selected from various periods. We will also supplement literary texts with some nonliterary texts and documentary films about disabled people.
Deformity, Sensibility and their Discontents: Visible Disability and the Construction of Modern Subjectivity
Helen Deutsch (University of California Los angeles)
These days first-person illness narrative is a highly popular genre that, according to critics in the relatively newborn field of "literature and medicine," functions as an affective supplement to the depersonalization of modern corporate medicine. This course will attempt to supplement the curious historical blindness of such critics to early modern illness narrative, by constructing, tentatively, a history of the genre (or at least one strand of such a history). We will do this by focusing on the figure of deformity (a word current in the early modern period but which now we would term “visible disability”) and its relationship to individual subjectivity. At the crossroads of visible excess and interior distinction, premodern monstrosity and modern abnormality, spectacular object and speaking author, the literature of deformity bears a particularly charged relationship to still-current ideas of individuality, the constructedness of the body, and the indelibility of embodied experience. Questions to consider include: How do ideas about disability in the eighteenth century newly legislate “normality” and “abnormality”? How does the eighteenth-century’s concern with defining bodily differences scientifically and “objectively” connect to its parallel concern with defining and embodying sexual and racial differences? How does the study of disability during this period entail the study of “normative” ideas of individual identity on the one hand, and “aberrant” exceptional genius on the other? How did the eighteenth century define disability, particularly in relationship to literary authorship, as both illegible aberration and exemplary exception? If the eighteenth century culture of sensibility defined our ideas of sympathy and sociability, what can eighteenth-century constructions of disability tell us about the limits of that sympathy? How might the eighteenth-century "culture of sensibility" inform, and threaten twentieth-century constructions of the body and its suffering? What did it mean to "have a body" in the eighteenth century and what does it mean today? Considering the inflections of gender and class on individual cases, we will ask the following questions: How did earlier writers on deformity connect the mind to the body, and how has that connection (or lack of connection) endured or changed in twentieth-century illness narratives? How might we read the eighteenth century as a transitional moment in the secularization and individualization of illness narrative, the solidification of the mind/body divide, and the division of aesthetic form from scientific knowledge? How might these divisions be gendered? Is it possible to resolve, and how might this history help us to resolve, Foucauldian views of the socially constructed body with phenomenological insistence on lived corporeality? My larger goal is to create a productive and nuanced connection between the "body studies" of the early modern period and the largely twentieth-century-oriented field of "disability studies."
Illness Narrative as Genre
Helen Deutsch (University of California Los angeles)
Today illness narrative, sometimes called “pathography,” is a highly popular genre, a genre that (according to critics in the relatively newborn field of “literature and medicine”) emerged as the modern individual’s response to the depersonalization of corporate medicine. Over the course of ten weeks we will examine this assumption, while attempting to come up with our own explanation for the proliferation of illness narratives at our particular historical moment. Most importantly, we will create our own “thick description” of illness narrative as a complex genre on the threshold of medical science and lived experience, fact and fiction, objectified body and speaking subject. Questions we will consider: What is illness and how and why do definitions of illness change over time? What is the relation between illness and identity? Is “disability” an “illness” or an identity or both? Why and how might we distinguish between mental and physical illness? Is mental illness an illness only by analogy to the physical? What difference does gender make to the experience of illness? We will examine a wide range of illness narratives ranging from neurologist Oliver Sacks’s third-person accounts of individual cases to first-person memoirs of (among other things) anorexia, depression, autism, and multiple sclerosis. We will contrast these “true” stories with others that are wholly or partly “fictional.” We will also consider a sampling of critical thought on the literature of illness. Our goal will be to cross the disciplinary boundaries of literature and medicine with our eyes on what literature can give to the emergent field of disability studies, and to the field of medical humanities (often quarantined from literary criticism).
Spectacles of Physical Deviance
Chris Gabbard (University of North Florida, Jacksonville)
This course aims to demonstrate the value of readings informed by Disability Studies.
The conflict between two paradigms of disability-the medical model versus the cultural model-will drive the course. Traditionally, social discourse and popular belief have been dominated by a medical (and therapeutic) model rooted in pathologizing disabled bodies and viewing them as defective and in need of repair. We will explore an alternative, cultural model by interrogating what Roland Barthes would call “mythologies” of disability as represented on the cultural level.
Examining (primarily) literary texts with an eye for the rhetoric and representation of physical, sensory, and cognitive impairment, we will ask questions such as: Do the disabled speak? To what degree do race, class, sex, and gender serve as stalking horses for disability? Does the text enact a divergence between individual embodiment and lack of societal access? What assumptions underlie or inform the text's rendering of disability? Does disability ripple through the text in unexpected ways? Has disability been used to challenge conventional notions of beauty, the body, normality, or typicality?
Cultural Studies/Body Studies
Martha Stoddard Holmes (California State University, San Marcos)
The cultural construction of embodied identities through written and visual representations is the focus of this cultural studies course. Our major emphasis will be on illness/health, disability/ability, beauty/ugliness, and aging, but gender, “race,” ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation will also be part of our discussion as they inevitably shape our social identities as ill or well, disabled or able, beautiful or ugly, young or old. We’ll survey cultural studies of the body that draw on disability studies, gender and queer studies, medical humanities, science studies, and various blends of these and other theoretical approaches; analyze, as a group, a range of textual and visual representations of the body and embodied identity; and conduct individual research projects culminating in seminar papers and a body studies conference.
Literature and Health
Martha Stoddard Holmes (California State University, San Marcos)
What are the stories we tell about health and illness, disability and aging, “normal” and “abnormal”, and other issues in the human (and post-human!) life cycle? Why do we tell stories of health and illness, and what are their social functions? How do such stories express and shape our life experiences?
As we read and watch imaginative works on literature and health, including novels, memoirs, poems, films, essays, and a graphic novel, we’ll investigate how traditional and non-traditional literary forms structure and give meanings to crucial life questions about illness, disability, and other life changes.
We’ll also learn or re-learn effective ways of thinking, talking, and writing about literature and film.
Autobiography: Disability Memoir
Georgina Kleege (University of California, Berkeley)
Autobiographies written by people with disabilities offer readers a glimpse into lives at the margins of mainstream culture, and thus can make disability seem less alien and frightening. Disability rights activists, however, often criticize these texts because they tend to reinforce the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that must be overcome through superhuman effort, rather than a set of cultural conditions that could be changed to benefit a wide range of individuals with similar impairments. Are these texts agents for social change or merely another form of freak show? In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of disability memoirs and consider both what they reveal about cultural attitudes toward disability and what they have in common with other forms of autobiography.
Representations of Disability in Literature
Georgina Kleege (University of California, Berkeley)
We will examine the ways disability is portrayed in a variety of works of fiction, autobiography and drama. We will also screen some film versions of these texts.
Disability Poetics and Narrative Theory
Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (Miami University of Ohio)
As disability studies in the humanities has grown in the last ten years, disability studies scholars are beginning to develop literary and aesthetic theories—a poetics—out of the subject and experiences of disability and the disabled body. A poetics of disability is important, Michael Davidson argues, because it “defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within language” and “unsettle[s] the thematics of embodiment” (7). One example of such rethinking of embodied writing: Memoirist Nancy Mairs writing from her position in a wheelchair, jokingly calls her point of view “sit point theory” –a play on feminist standpoint theory crossed with a disability perspective.
G. Thomas Couser analyzes the multitude of types of disability narratives and rhetorics and categorizes their defining moves—for instance, he argues that the rhetoric of triumph features the overcoming of obstacles; horror, or "Gothic rhetoric” often appears in narratives of cure, which can also adopt the plot lines of the medical paradigm; narratives of spiritual compensation redefine success as a turn toward faith or read disability as having a higher purpose. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder coin the term “narrative prosthesis” to describe the function of disability within narrative structures. They argue that narratives depend on disability to represent, disrupt, and critique society, but note that this “discursive dependency” on disability is an oddly invisible, unstable, and disappearing act, too. Readers often “screen out” disability, even when it’s there.
Does disability studies scholarship lead us to new understandings of narrative and poetic theory? To sharper distinctions between the concepts of typicality and normality? To new insights on familiar texts? To different conceptualizations of language, metaphor, the body, and writing? We’ll inquire into these questions and others as we read, discuss, and write about selected readings from literature and theory.
Disability and Representation
Carrie Sandahl (Florida State University)
“Disability and Representation” is an advanced introduction that surveys the way in which the arts and popular culture (including literature, fine arts, performance, advertising, documentary film, video) have both reflected and contributed to attitudes and public policy concerning people with disabilities. The course will take a disability studies approach, which considers the social and cultural aspects of disability. This approach recognizes that conceptions of disability change radically over time and across cultures, and that disability is not, primarily, an objective description of individual pathological bodies. The course will focus on disability representations in the United States; however, to highlight the way in which disability is socially constructed, we will look at several examples of disability representations from other cultures (both Western and non-Western). Students will be exposed to both disability theory and history, which will provide critical tools and frameworks to interpret the representations under study.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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