Lit and Culture: Disability in America

Catalog description

This course focuses on representations of disability in U.S. literature, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is also an introduction to disability studies, a vibrant field of interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and criticism that examines the ways in which disability has been socially and culturally constructed in literature, history, and the sciences. We will explore the ways in which works of American fiction, drama, and film have informed (and been informed by) cultural constructions of disability, with particular attention to the modern project of "norming" bodies and minds that took hold in the 20th century. And we will consider how recent works of poetry and first-person nonfiction by writers identifying as disabled have complicated, resisted, and rewritten such notions by developing new literary and artistic strategies, vocabularies, and meanings of disability.