Images of Idiocy

Images of Idiocy PDF Author: Martin Halliwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351928848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.

Images of Idiocy

Images of Idiocy PDF Author: Martin Halliwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351928848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.

Idiocy

Idiocy PDF Author: Patrick McDonagh
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846310954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In ancient Athens, “idiots” were those selfish citizens who dishonorably declined to participate in the life of the polis, and whose disavowal of the public interest was seen as poor taste and an indication of judgment. Over time, however, the term idiot has shifted from that philosophically uncomplicated definition to an ever-changing sociological signifier, encompassing a wide range of meanings and beliefs for those concerned with intellectual and cognitive disability. Idiocy: A Cultural History offers for the first time a analysis of the concept, drawing on cultural, sociological, scientific, and popular representations ranging from Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy” and Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge to Down’s “Ethnic classification of idiots.” It tracks how our changing definition of idiocy intersects with demography, political movements, philosophical traditions, economic concerns, and the growth of the medical profession.

Those They Called Idiots

Those They Called Idiots PDF Author: Simon Jarrett
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789143020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Sensitive and sweeping, this is a history of the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England, to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today’s society. Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today’s society. Using evidence from civil and criminal courtrooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art, and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalized in society.

The Power of Positive Idiocy

The Power of Positive Idiocy PDF Author: David Feherty
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385530749
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
David Feherty, ex-pro golfer and current commentator at NBC Sports and the Golf Channel, delivers a laugh-out-loud funny and totally uncensored collection of rants sure to surprise and crack up golfers everywhere. Have you ever wondered where the weaknesses are in Tiger's game? Or what would happen if there were PGA Tour cheerleaders? Or how Old Tom Morris would play if he came back from the dead? In The Power of Positive Idiocy, readers will be treated to Feherty's answers to these questions, as well as his distinctive commentary on aging, Texas, the Irish, parenting, addiction, Charles Barkley, and, of course, every pro golfer and golfing situation you can imagine. Full of great laughs, ridiculous wisecracks, and some of the best advice for anyone new to the game of golf, Feherty’s remarkable collection is a must have for golfers of every stripe.

Representing Autism

Representing Autism PDF Author: Stuart Fletcher Murray
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1781388237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From concerns of an ‘autism epidemic’ to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. Representing Autism is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. Representing Autism analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.

Testing Fate

Testing Fate PDF Author: Shelley Z. Reuter
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452951896
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In today’s world, responsible biocitizenship has become a new way of belonging in society. Individuals are expected to make “responsible” medical choices, including the decision to be screened for genetic disease. Paradoxically, we have even come to see ourselves as having the right to be responsible vis-à-vis the proactive mitigation of genetic risk. At the same time, the concept of genetic disease has become a new and powerful way of defining the boundaries between human groups. Tay-Sachs, an autosomal recessive disorder, is a case in point—with origins in the period of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States and United Kingdom that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has a long and fraught history as a marker of Jewish racial difference. In Testing Fate, Shelley Z. Reuter asks: Can the biocitizen, especially one historically defined as a racialized and pathologized Other, be said to be exercising authentic, free choice in deciding whether to undertake genetic screening? Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples—doctors’ medical reports of Tay-Sachs since the first case was documented in 1881, the medical field’s construction of Tay-Sachs as a disease of Jewish immigrants, YouTube videos of children with Tay-Sachs that frame the disease as tragic disability avoidable through a simple genetic test, and medical malpractice suits since the test for the disease became available—Reuter shows that true agency in genetic decision-making can be exercised only from a place of cultural inclusion. Choice in this context is in fact a kind of unfreedom—a moral duty to act that is not really agency at all.

Disability and Modern Fiction

Disability and Modern Fiction PDF Author: A. Hall
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230355471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Focusing on Faulkner, Morrison and Coetzee as authors, critics and Nobel Prize-winning intellectuals, this book explores shifting representations of disability in 20th and 21st century literature and proposes new ways of reading their works in relation to one another, whilst highlighting the ethical, aesthetic and imaginative challenges they pose.

Idiocy, Imbecility and Insanity in Victorian Society

Idiocy, Imbecility and Insanity in Victorian Society PDF Author: Stef Eastoe
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030273350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explores the understudied history of the so-called ‘incurables’ in the Victorian period, the people identified as idiots, imbeciles and the weak-minded, as opposed to those thought to have curable conditions. It focuses on Caterham, England’s first state imbecile asylum, and analyses its founding, purpose, character, and most importantly, its residents, innovatively recreating the biographies of these people. Created to relieve pressure on London’s overcrowded workhouses, Caterham opened in September 1870. It was originally intended as a long-stay institution for the chronic and incurable insane paupers of the metropolis, more commonly referred to as idiots and imbeciles. This purpose instantly differentiates Caterham from the more familiar, and more researched, lunatic asylums, which were predicated on the notion of cure and restoration of the senses. Indeed Caterham, built following the welfare and sanitary reforms of the late 1860s, was an important feature of the Victorian institutional landscape, and it represented a shift in social, medical and political responsibility towards the care and management of idiot and imbecile paupers.

A Disability History of the United States

A Disability History of the United States PDF Author: Kim E. Nielsen
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807022039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The first book to cover the entirety of disability history, from pre-1492 to the present Disability is not just the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States is the first book to place the experiences of people with disabilities at the center of the American narrative. In many ways, it’s a familiar telling. In other ways, however, it is a radical repositioning of US history. By doing so, the book casts new light on familiar stories, such as slavery and immigration, while breaking ground about the ties between nativism and oralism in the late nineteenth century and the role of ableism in the development of democracy. A Disability History of the United States pulls from primary-source documents and social histories to retell American history through the eyes, words, and impressions of the people who lived it. As historian and disability scholar Nielsen argues, to understand disability history isn’t to narrowly focus on a series of individual triumphs but rather to examine mass movements and pivotal daily events through the lens of varied experiences. Throughout the book, Nielsen deftly illustrates how concepts of disability have deeply shaped the American experience—from deciding who was allowed to immigrate to establishing labor laws and justifying slavery and gender discrimination. Included are absorbing—at times horrific—narratives of blinded slaves being thrown overboard and women being involuntarily sterilized, as well as triumphant accounts of disabled miners organizing strikes and disability rights activists picketing Washington. Engrossing and profound, A Disability History of the United States fundamentally reinterprets how we view our nation’s past: from a stifling master narrative to a shared history that encompasses us all.

Idiocy: and its treatment by the physiological method

Idiocy: and its treatment by the physiological method PDF Author: Edward Seguin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description