"Literature And Disability," Emory University, Benjamin Reiss

Literature And Disability
SPRING 2017
MWF 12:00-12:50
Callaway Center S105

Professor: Benjamin Reiss

benjamin.reiss@emory.edu

Course Description:

This course will explore both literary representations of disability and disability studies as an interpretive lens for reading and interpreting literature. With surprising frequency, writers from antiquity to the present have relied on characters whose bodies and minds deviate from their cultures’ notions of normal or ideal functioning in order to generate symbolic meanings. In recent decades, as people with disabilities have fought to attain civil rights and full access to social institutions, a literary tradition of disability life writing has created a space for representing disability at is experienced in the social world, rather than in the symbolic imagination. We will read a handful of classic and contemporary texts, as well as powerful life writing by authors who identify as disabled.. Additionally, the course will serve as an introduction to the field of disability studies, which explores the social and cultural factors that shape the relationship between non-standard bodies/minds and the environments in which they struggle for access.

Required Books:
Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, eds., Keywords for Disability Studies
Lennard Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed. (available online via Blackboard)
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
Christina Crosby, The Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression
One book chosen by class
Additional short readings available via Blackboard

Assignments:

Papers: Three 5-6-page papers will be due through the course of the semester, one of which must be revised based on instructors’ feedback. You will have an opportunity to choose different formats for each of these papers, but you must use option #1 once or twice:

1) A close-reading of one of the assigned texts in class, incorporating at least two secondary sources. These sources may include assigned essays (including Keywords entries), and/or critical sources in journals or books.

2) Choose two keywords in the volume and relate them to a current event, literary text, historical or biographical document, commercial, or performance. Write an essay explaining how your perception of the event or the text changes in light of each of the two terms, and how the event or text might change your understanding of the terms. Examples might include thinking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disability in terms of “Invisibility” and “Passing,” Moby-Dick in terms of “Trauma” and “Prosthesis,” or a musical performance in terms of “Access,” “Aesthetics,” and “Senses.” You may choose to write this paper in conjunction with your group presentation.

3) Choose one keyword entry in the volume and read 3-4 important sources cited by the author. Write an essay analyzing how the author of the keyword entry responded to previous scholarship, what new ideas emerge from the keyword entry itself, and what other aspects of the term might have been emphasized.

4) Carefully explore and describe one aspect of your built environment, whether it is your dorm room, a favorite café, a park, a library, a bathroom, or a shopping mall. Using entries on “Access,” “Design,” “Embodiment,” “Space,” and “Accommodation,” describe the ways that people with different kinds of bodies would experience the space you have chosen. Then imagine how the space might have been designed differently.

5) Using the essays on “Education,” “Communication,” “Diversity,” and “Cognition” as your starting point, analyze features of your own school, your own classroom, and the syllabus for your course. How might a disability perspective shed light on those concepts within the context of your own education? What are the implicit assumptions about the abilities one must possess in order to navigate a given educational environment?

6) Choose a piece of technology that you find particularly useful. Using the entry on “Technology” and at least two others in the book (e.g. “Senses,” “Prosthetics,” “Blindness,” “Ability,” “Work”) as conceptual guides, explain how that object might be designed with particular kinds of bodies and abilities in mind.

We are open to other possible paper formats making use of assigned texts in the class, but alternate formats will need to be proposed in writing and approved by the instructors.

Revision: One of the three papers for the course must be revised, based on instructors’ comments. This must be a substantial re-working of the ideas and/or structure of the paper, possibly incorporating additional secondary material. The original paper and the revision will receive separate grades. The revision will be due on the exam date for the course, May 2, but we encourage you to submit your revision within two weeks after receipt of instructors’ written comments.

Group Presentation: Groups of 4-5 students will lead discussion for approximately 25-30 minutes on a disability-related topic of their choosing. Each group will locate and summarize 4-5 outside sources to help explain the topic to the class at large and lead a discussion on its significance and relevance to other course readings. Topics could involve: a particular kind of disability experience no extensively covered in class, a concept central to the disability experience (either included in Keywords or not), a significant person or group in disability history, an artwork or artistic collective, a program or organization of significance to disability. Each group will also be responsible for submitting a short annotated bibliography of sources on their topic.

Weekly Blackboard postings: All students should make a brief post reflecting on the current reading. This can take the form of an interpretive question, the highlighting of a significant passage, connections between different works, connections between assigned works and contemporary issues, or other thoughts pertaining to the readings. We will be dividing the class into a Monday, a Wednesday and a Friday group. Each group is responsible for making posts by 10 p.m. the night before class.

Participation: Students are expected to contribute regularly, both through in-class discussion and through the Blackboard site. No letter grade will be given for participation, but it will be taken into account in determining the final grade.

Grading:
Papers: 70%
Each paper will be given roughly equal weight, with some consideration given to improvement over the course of the semester.
Presentation: 15%
Participation (including class discussion and weekly Blackboard posting): 15%

All assignments must be completed in order for student to receive a passing grade.

CLASS SCHEDULE:

Wednesday, January 11: Introductions
Emily Dickinson: “I Heard, As If I Had No Ear”

Friday, January 13:
Keywords: Introduction, Disability, Access, Crip, Stigma, Identity, Rights

Monday, January 16: MLK Day (no classes)

Wednesday, January 18
Keyword: Eugenics
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, Introduction and chaps. 1-4

Friday, January 20
Keyword: Cognition
Conrad, The Secret Agent, chaps 5-7

Monday, January 23
Keyword: Reproduction
Conrad, The Secret Agent, chaps. 8-9

Wednesday, January 25
Conrad, The Secret Agent, chaps. 10-11

Friday, January 27
Conrad, The Secret Agent, chap. 12
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 17)

Monday, January 30:
Keywords: Communication, Dependency, Family, Human

Wednesday, February 1
Harriet McBryde Johnson, “Unspeakable Conversations” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 37)
Lennard Davis, “Disability, Normality, and Power” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 1)

Friday, February 3
Keywords: “Embodiment,” “Pain”
Christina Crosby, A Body Undone, chaps. 1-4
Monday, February 5
Keywords: Queer, Sex, Sexuality, chaps.
Crosby, A Body Undone, chaps.5-10

Wednesday, February 8
Keyword, Trauma
Crosby, A Body Undone, chaps. 11-14
PAPER #1 DUE

Friday, February 10
Crosby, A Body Undone, chaps. 15-18
Thomas Couser, Introduction to Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Blackboard)

Monday, February 13
Keyword: Illness
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, Prologue, chaps. 1-2

Wednesday, February 15
Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, chaps. 3-5
GROUP PRESENTATION #1

Friday, February 17
Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, chaps. 6-8

Monday, February 20
Grealy, Autobiography of a Face, chaps. 9-10
Couser, chap. 8 of Signifying Bodies

Wednesday, February 22
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, from Deaf in America (Blackboard)
Rachel Kolb, “The Deaf Body in Public Space” (Blackboard)

Friday, February 24
H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, Introduction to Deaf Gain (Blackboard)
John Lee Clark, “Melodies Unheard” and selected poetry (Blackboard)

Monday, February 27
Peter Cook, Flying Words Project (Blackboard)
Michael Davidson, from Concerto for the Left Hand (Blackboard)

Wednesday, March 1
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Part I chaps. 1-3

Friday, March 3
Keyword: Madness
McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, chaps. 4-5

Monday, March 6-Friday, March 10: SPRING BREAK

Monday, March 13

McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Part II

Wednesday, March 15
McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Part III
GROUP PRESENTATION #2
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, from Extraordinary Bodies (Blackboard)

Friday, March 17
Joseph Straus, “Autism as Culture” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 34)
Amanda Boggs, “In My Language” (Blackboard)
PAPER #2 DUE

Monday, March 20
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, p. 1-61

Wednesday, March 22
Haddon, The Curious Incident, p.61-126
Materials on Haddon controversy
GROUP PRESENTATION #3

Friday, March 24: Class canceled, Professor Reiss at conference

Monday, March 27
Haddon, The Curious Incident, p. 126-221
Ralph James Savarese, “The Superior Half of Speaking” and “More than a Thing to Ignore: An Interview with Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay”
Tito Mukhopadhyay, “Five Poems”

Wednesday, March 29
Keyword: Race
Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 2)

Friday, March 31
Keyword: Madness
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me, 1-48

Monday, April 3
Danquah, Willow Weep for Me,49-125
GROUP PRESENTATION #4

Wednesday, April 5
Bradley Lewis, “A Mad Fight: Psychiatry and Disability Activism” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 9),
Danquah, Willow Weep for Me, 125-168

Friday, April 7
Margaret Price, “Defining Mental Disability” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 22)
Danquah, Willow Weep for Me 169-226
PAPER #3 DUE

Monday, April 10
Danquah, Willow Weep for Me, 226-266
Anna Mollow, “When Black Women Start Going on Prozac” (Disability Studies Reader, chap. 30)

Wednesday, April 12
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Friday, April 14
Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Monday, April 24
Achebe, Things Fall Apart

May 2: Revision Due 5 p.m.