A Brief Typology of Disability Representations (1)

In this episode we will be drawing up a typology of literary representations of disability, that is to say, on the varied ways in which persons with disability are represented in literature and film. The place of disabled characters in the literary and aesthetic domain is assigned within a structure of relations. Even though generalizations might be possible with respect to representations of people with disability in literature, the literary relations through which they are manifested differ from text to text. The point is that the structure of such literary relations enjoins us to isolate the disabled character for examination only as a preliminary step towards re-inserting them into the interrelated thresholds of meanings that are established in their relationship to other characters and to images, motifs, social settings, and to broader ethical concepts that are seen within the literary text. In other words, disability is to be read as a fulcrum or pivot out of which various discursive details emerge, gain salience, and ultimately get transformed within the literary aesthetic field.
Suggested Reading
Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupatios and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998)
Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press,1999)
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder , Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001).
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995).
Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004)
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
Tom Shakespeare, The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives, (London: Cassell Publishers, 1998).
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, (New York: NYU Press, 1996).
Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

[@NijumoniDoley-k7b]

Nice Sir

[@blankname5177]

I missed that connection to disability in The Bluest Eye. Thank you for bringing it to light.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

I'm glad it was helpful!