PS/Ü: Contemporary Negotiations of Disability in American Literature and Film

Tue (3) HSZ 03
 
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 their provocative book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse literary scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder describe the function of disability in English literature as primarily twofold. According to them, not only does disability pervade literary narrative as “a stock feature of characterization,” but also as “an opportunistic metaphorical device.”

In this course we want to study, discuss, and challenge Mitchell and Snyder’s concept of a “narrative prosthesis.” In attending to this subject, we will alternate our attention between critical, theoretical work and primary literary texts. In doing so, we will focus on contemporary negotiations of physical disability in American literature and film. During the course of the semester, we will discuss whether disability has become subject to its own “minority literature” and whether those (semi-)fictional texts by and about people with disabilities, which possibly constitute such a “disability literature,” challenge more traditional negotiations of disability, thereby also challenging the “narrative prosthesis.”

Please purchase:
Susan Nussbaum: Good Kings, Bad Kings [ISBN 1780743858]
Audre Lorde: The Cancer Journals [ISBN 1879960737]