A Literary History of Disability, Medicine, and the Social Model

Catalog description

This seminar introduces disability studies via the disability narrative, a genre that we will continuously theorize and critique. The field is relatively new but its concerns carry a long history. We begin with humanisms inward turn away from divine explanation. Michel de Montaigne, for example, no longer content to accept disability as a mark of God's wrath, diligently ponders the infinity of [human] forms and our notions of physical difference. Centuries later, Friedrich Nietzsche recovers those deviating natures for the social good; far from stigma, disability is, for him, a generative exile from the stifling mainstream. Our critical perspectives on race, gender, class, and sexuality depend on these foundational theories of disability. We track our literary history by attending to the stories of disabled or disfigured bodies, from Frances Burney's eighteenth-century account of her mastectomy to Mean Little deaf Queer (2010), Terry Galloway's quirky memoir about her little-D deafness. Through secondary readings, we also develop a sophisticated critical apparatus from which to interpret disability in all its forms. Our primary readings may include selections from John Milton, Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Jorge Luis Borges.