Seminar: A - Disability in Literature and Art; B - Multicultural Literature Check schedule to…

Catalog description

The artistic tradition is rife with representation of disability. These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil. Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death. Disability Studies asks us to reframe our understanding of disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and understand and learn about the presence of disability culture, the widely diverse members of which are also using literature to tell their own stories in a vibrant new artistic tradition. Literature is and has been obsessed with the disabled body, both as metaphor and actual subject - an extension of the degree to which disability has loomed in the larger societal imagination in one way or another across centuries. Rather than trying to catalog all the examples of disability in literature, this seminar seeks to use disability studies as a genesis point and theoretical framework through which to examine several core questions about disability, literature, and the problems and opportunities arising from the intersection of the two. We will: Reconsider representations of disability in literary, artistic, and cultural texts. How are such depictions used as literary devices? What beliefs do these images promote about disability? Examine how “disability” and “normalcy” are culturally constructed categories like race, gender, class, and sexuality. How does disability intersect with these other identity categories? Study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture. This writing establishes history, explores identity, refutes/reclaims stereotypes, and promotes discourse within the disability community. We will look at genres ranging from memoir to fiction to performance to film. As how the principles of disability justice…