The Disarticulate

The Disarticulate PDF Author: James Berger
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814729061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Language is integral to our social being. But what is the status of those who stand outside of language? The mentally disabled, “wild” children, people with autism and other neurological disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at its borders. In the intricate verbal constructions of modern literature, the ‘disarticulate’—those at the edges of language—have, paradoxically, played essential, defining roles. Drawing on the disarticulate figures in modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others, James Berger shows in this intellectually bracing study how these characters mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the greatest ethical tension, as society confronts the needs and desires of “the least of its brothers.” Berger argues that the disarticulate is that which is unaccountable in the discourses of modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the prevailing social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate figures reveal modernity’s anxieties in terms of how it constructs its others.

The Disarticulate

The Disarticulate PDF Author: James Berger
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814708331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Language is integral to our social being. But what is the status of those who stand outside of language? The mentally disabled, "wild" children, people with autism and other neurological disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at its borders. In the intricate verbal constructions of modern literature, the "disarticulate", those at the edges of language, have, paradoxically, played essential, defining roles. Drawing on the disarticulate figures in modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others, the author shows in this study how these characters mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the greatest ethical tension, as society confronts the needs and desires of the least of its brothers. Here the author argues that the disarticulate is that which is unaccountable in the discourses of modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the prevailing social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate figures reveal modernity's anxieties in terms of how it constructs its others. -- From publisher's website.

Deafening Modernism

Deafening Modernism PDF Author: Rebecca Sanchez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479828866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Deafening Modernism tells the story of modernism from the perspective of Deaf critical insight. Working to develop a critical Deaf theory independent of identity-based discourse, Rebecca Sanchez excavates the intersections between Deaf and modernist studies. She traces the ways that Deaf culture, history, linguistics, and literature provide a vital and largely untapped resource for understanding the history of American language politics and the impact that history has had on modernist aesthetic production. Discussing Deaf and disability studies in these unexpected contexts highlights the contributions the field can make to broader discussions of the intersections between images, bodies, and text. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including literary analysis and history, linguistics, ethics, and queer, cultural, and film studies, Sanchez sheds new light on texts by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Charlie Chaplin, and many others. By approaching modernism through the perspective of Deaf and disability studies, Deafening Modernism reconceptualizes deafness as a critical modality enabling us to freshly engage topics we thought we knew.

Amending the Abject Body

Amending the Abject Body PDF Author: Deborah Caslav Covino
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484335
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Feminist theorists have often argued that aesthetic surgeries and body makeovers dehumanize and disempower women patients, whose efforts at self-improvement lead to their objectification. Amending the Abject Body proposes that although objectification is an important element in this phenomenon, the explosive growth of "makeover culture" can be understood as a process of both abjection (ridding ourselves of the unwanted) and identification (joining the community of what Julia Kristeva calls "clean and proper bodies"). Drawing from the advertisement and advocacy of body makeovers on television, in aesthetic surgery trade books, and in the print and Web-based marketing of face lifts, tummy tucks, and Botox injections, Deborah Caslav Covino articulates the relationship among objectification, abjection, and identification, and offers a fuller understanding of contemporary beauty-desire.

Autism in a Decentered World

Autism in a Decentered World PDF Author: Alice Wexler
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317594320
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Autistic people are empirically and scientifically generalized as living in a fragmented, alternate reality, without a coherent continuous self. In Part I, this book presents recent neuropsychological research and its implications for existing theories of autism, selfhood, and identity, challenging common assumptions about the formation and structure of the autistic self and autism’s relationship to neurotypicality. Through several case studies in Part II, the book explores the ways in which artists diagnosed with autism have constructed their identities through participation within art communities and cultures, and how the concept of self as ‘story’ can be utilized to better understand the neurological differences between autism and typical cognition. This book will be of particular interest to researchers and scholars within the fields of Disability Studies, Art Education, and Art Therapy.

Beholding Disability in Renaissance England

Beholding Disability in Renaissance England PDF Author: Allison P. Hobgood
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472904744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Human variation has always existed, though it has been conceived of and responded to variably. Beholding Disability in Renaissance England interprets sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature to explore the fraught distinctiveness of human bodyminds and the deliberate ways they were constructed in early modernity as able, and not. Hobgood examines early modern disability, ableism, and disability gain, purposefully employing these contemporary concepts to make clear how disability has historically been disavowed—and avowed too. Thus, this book models how modern ideas and terms make the weight of the past more visible as it marks the present, and cultivates dialogue in which early modern and contemporary theoretical models are mutually informative. Beholding Disability also uncovers crucial counterdiscourses circulating in the English Renaissance that opposed cultural fantasies of ability and had a keen sensibility toward non-normative embodiments. Hobgood reads impairments as varied as epilepsy, stuttering, disfigurement, deafness, chronic pain, blindness, and castration in order to understand not just powerful fictions of ability present during the Renaissance but also the somewhat paradoxical, surprising ways these ableist ideals provided creative fodder for many Renaissance writers and thinkers. Ultimately, Beholding Disability asks us to reconsider what we think we know about being human both in early modernity, and today.

Economic Growth and Development in Africa

Economic Growth and Development in Africa PDF Author: Horman Chitonge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131757530X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In recent years, Africa has undergone the longest period of sustained economic growth in the continent’s history, drawing the attention of the international media and academics alike. This book analyses the Africa Rising narrative from multidisciplinary perspectives, offering a critical assessment of the explanations given for the poor economic growth and development performance in Africa prior to the millennium and the dramatic shift towards the new Africa. Bringing in perspectives from African intellectuals and scholars, many of whom have previously been overlooked in this debate, the book examines the construction of Africa’s economic growth and development portraits over the years. It looks at two institutions that play a vital role in African development, providing a detailed explanation of how the World Bank and the IMF have interpreted and dealt with the African challenges and experiences. The insightful analysis reveals that if Africa is rising, only 20-30 per cent of Africans are aboard the rising ship, and the main challenge facing the continent today is to bring on board the majority of Africans who have been excluded from growth. This book makes the complex, and sometimes confusing debates on Africa’s economic growth experience more accessible to a wide range of readers interested in the Africa story. It is essential reading for students and researchers in African Studies, and will be of great interest to scholars in Development Studies, Political Economy, and Development Economics.

Distressing Language

Distressing Language PDF Author: Michael Davidson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479813869
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The role of disability and deafness in art Distressing Language is full of mistakes—errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of “sounding good”? Distressing Language grows out of the author’s experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge. Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim’s audiovisual installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are working with the axiom of “error” to produce novel subjecthoods and possibilities.

Body Language

Body Language PDF Author: G. Couser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315531232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment – we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature – autobiography – should address these common features of human experience. Yet for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women’s liberation, with its signature manifesto Our Bodies Ourselves, supported the breast cancer narrative; the gay rights movement encouraged AIDS narrative in response to a deadly epidemic; and the disability rights movement stimulated a surge in narratives of various disabilities. Conversely, the narratives helped to advance the respective rights movements. Such writing, then, has been representative in two senses of the term: aesthetic (mimetic) and political (acting on behalf of). It has done, and continues to do, important cultural work. This volume explores this phenomenon using the latest critical theories and from the perspectives of patients and creative writers as well as academics. It attends to the problematic intersection of trauma and disability; it encompasses graphic narratives, essays, and diaries, as well as full-length memoirs; and it examines the ethical as well as the aesthetic dimensions of narrative. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing

The Oxford History of Life-Writing PDF Author: Patrick Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019266896X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 627

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Book Description
With the growing urgency of questions about how to claim identity and achieve authenticity, life-writing started to acquire an unprecedented cultural importance. A range of social and economic developments, from the publishing boom in memoir writing to the rise of the internet, transformed the possibilities for self-expression. By the end of the timespan covered in this book life-writing was no longer something done mainly by important individuals who wrote their autobiography, or by sensitive souls who kept a diary. It became a truly ubiquitous phenomenon, part and parcel of the everyday formation of selfhood. Considering a diverse range of texts from across the English-speaking world, this volume places life-writing in relation to wider debates about the sociology and philosophy of modern identity, and the changing marketplace of publishing and bookselling. Yet in doing so it seeks above all to credit the extraordinary literary inventiveness which the pursuit of self-knowledge inspired in this period. Major subjects addressed include: the aftermath of World War II, including responses to the Holocaust; the impact of psychoanalysis on biography; autofiction, autrebiography, and changing ideas about authentic self-knowledge; coming out memoirs and the transformation of sexual identity; feminist exemplary writing and lyric poetry; multilingualism and intercultural life-writing; the memoir boom and the decline of intimacy; testimony narrative and memory culture; posthumanism in theory and practice; literary biography as an alternative to literary theory; literary celebrity and its consequences for literature; social media and digital life-writing.

Cissie Loftus

Cissie Loftus PDF Author: Robert Howard Russell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description