Courses

Disability Studies today takes on an ever-expanding role in public awareness, in social policy, and in the academy across a number of disciplines: sociology, political science, law, psychology, medicine, and the arts and literatures.  This course offers a survey of literary texts and related media, the bulk of them in English, in which eccentric bodies and minds play a major role.  Along with these, we read a number of major statements in Disability Studies, linked to the primary texts.  At the same time, the course’s study of ancient and medieval texts aims to expand the range of categories under which most work in Disability Studies operates, to include (in addition) the place of bodily difference in the operations of the sacred, the heroic, the ideal, and the monstrous.

While the course will focus on motor disability and bodily variety, I will encourage you (and require you, in the Bibliographical Exercise, see below) to seek out texts that address other issues such as blindness, deafness, or mental difference.  Issues we will address include, in addition, 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; the prison of metaphor; disabled identity and the return of the memoire.