A Crip Culture Talks Back: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing and Fiction (SoSe 2018)

Over the last three decades, the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies has given unprecedented visibility to the concerns of people with disabilities. Looking critically at and beyond its medical definitions, disability has become a research object for scholars within the arts and humanities, drawing considerable scholarly attention to the ways in which people with disabilities are represented in literature, film, and television. In disability studies, scholars’ own life writing and the “experiential knowledge” (Bolt 2013, 1) it contains is frequently used as a productive epistemological tool, bringing new ideas to the forefront of the field. In this class, we will explore the narrative dynamics of these “new disability memoirs” (Couser 2010, 164) and their fictive counterparts.

In attending to this subject, we will alternate our attention between theoretical texts and a versatile collection of primary texts, including memoirs, novels, short stories, and poetry. In doing so, we will focus on contemporary negotiations of physical and sensory disability in contemporary American literature. During the course of the semester, we will discuss whether disability has become subject to its own “minority literature” and whether and in what ways those (semi-)fictional texts by and about disabled people challenge more traditional negotiations of disability in American culture.

Please purchase:

Susan Nussbaum: Good Kings, Bad Kings [ISBN 1780743858]

Kenny Fries: The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory [ISBN 0786720077]

R. J. Palacio: Wonder [ISBN 0375869026]