ENGL W4917y Writing on Disability
(Christopher Baswell) Mon/Wed 2:40-3:55. Lecture.
Writings about disability and eccentric bodies, from Oedipus of the swollen foot
to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Texts will cover a range of
periods, including medieval narratives of miraculous cure, the hunchback king in
Shakespeare's Richard III, a powerfully immobile and sexually magnetic
woman in Trollope's Barchester Towers, and “Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane?” While the course will focus on motor disability and bodily variety,
students will be encouraged (and required) to seek out texts that address other
issues such as blindness, deafness, or mental disability. Critical readings
will be drawn from the emerging field of Disability Studies. Issues to be
addressed will include the great historical shift from notions of the "ideal" or
heroic, to the "normal" body; the social construction of disability; the cripple
as icon or agent; disabled identity and the return of the memoire. Two short
papers, a mid-term and a take-home final.
Syllabus:
ENGL 4917 WRITING ABOUT
DISABILITY:
SCHEDULE OF READINGS
WEEK 1
MEETING 1: Introduction: What is Disability Studies? Critical theory or
social movement? Can these two categories help each other? Who defines
disability, for what ends?
MEETING 2:
Nancy Mairs, “On Being a Cripple” (course reader)
Leonard Kriegel, “Beloved Enemy: A Cripple in the City” (course reader) In Ruth
O’Brien, ed., Voices from the Edge (NY: Oxford, 2004), pp. 121 – 36.
Tobin Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Construction to the New
Realism of the Body,” in Davis, Reader, pp. 173 – 84.
WEEK 2
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
Stiker, Ch. 3 “Western Antiquity: the Fear of the Gods,” pp. 39 – 64.
Background reading: Tiresias, Hephaistos/Vulcan (course reader)
WEEK 3
MEETING 1: Beowulf, trans. Michael Alexander (Penguin, 2003), pp. 3 –
33 (course reader)
Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages (U
Toronto Press, 2003), Introduction, “Conceptualizing the Monstrous,” pp. 1 – 27
(course reader)
MEETING 2: Gerald of Wales, History and Topography of Ireland, Book 2,
trans. John O’Meara (Penguin), pp. 57 – 91 (course reader)
Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
(U Chicago, 2001), 1, “Overture: Recovering Otis,” pp. 1 – 24 (course reader)
WEEK 4
MEETING 1: The Life of St. Osith, trans. Jane Zatta, amended and annotated
by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. Papers on Language and Literature 41, nos. 3-4,
Special Issue (2005) (course reader).
Stiker, Ch. 2, “The Bible and Disability: The Cult of God”
MEETING 2: Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, The
Pardoner and Summoner; The Pardoner’s Tale (course reader)
Erving Goffman, Selections from Stigma, in Davis, Reader, pp. 131
– 40.
Susan Sontag, “AIDS and its Metaphors,” in Davis, Reader, pp. 153 – 60.
WEEK 5
William Shakespeare, Richard III
Shelley Tremain, “On the Government of Disability: Foucault, Power, and the
Subject of Impairment,” in Davis, Reader, pp. 185 – 97.
WEEK 6 FIRST PAPER DUE
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, ch. 11, “Of Cripples" At
http://www.aber.ac.uk/~jmcwww/
Francis Bacon, “Of Deformity” (course reader)
[? John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pages on changeling]
Stiker, Ch. 4 “The System(s) of Charity”
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis and The Materiality of
Metaphor,” in Davis, Reader, pp. 205 – 16.
WEEK 7 MIDTERM 1
Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” and “The First Epistle of the
First Book of Horace: To Lord Bolingbroke” (course reader)
Stiker, Ch. 5 “The Classical Centuries: The Chill”
Helen Deutsch, “Bolingbroke’s Laugh: Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bolingbroke
and the Rhetoric of Bodied Exemplarity,” Studies in the Literary
Imagination 38 (2005): 137 – 61. (pdf file)
WEEK 8
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the
Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in Davis, Reader,
pp. 3 – 16.
WEEK 9 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EXERCISE DUE
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
WEEK 10
Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
James C. Wilson, “(Re)Writing the Genetic Body: Disability, Textuality, and the
Human Genome Project,” in Davis, Reader, pp, 67 – 78.
WEEK 11
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
WEEK 12 SECOND PAPER DUE
Documentary: “The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?” directed by Adam
Curtis, at
www.freedocumentaries.org
WEEK 13 MIDTERM 2
Film: “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
Stiker, Ch. 6, “The Birth of Rehabilitation”
WEEK 14
Texts to be determined: selections from Bibliographical Exercise