The Poetics of Disability
“We have
not yet determined what a body can do.”—Baruch Spinoza
“My body
is the problem.”—Amber DiPietra
Course Description The 17th Century Dutch Philosopher,
Baruch Spinoza, wrote that “we have not yet determined what a body can do,”
thus foreshadowing many of the problems of modern scientific and medical
discourse. I would like to take his comment in an affirmative sense, in the
spirit of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari whom often quoted
this very phrase—that specific bodies contain capacities unbeknownst to us
which may advance our knowledge about the world, but that they may also challenge
definitions of “the human” which have worked against a more inclusive and just
society. In the first weeks of this course we will consider how modernist
aesthetics are forged through thinking about disability. Particularly important
will be Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of “enstrangement,” which he recognizes in
his essay “Art as Device” as a defining effect of poetic language, and Martin
Heidegger’s idea of “conspicuousness,” which facilitates knowledge of a thing’s
essence. To what extent may these texts allow us to explore disability as an
aesthetic problematic echoing modernist preoccupations with a discourse of the
senses, formal innovation, difficulty, estrangement, and constraint? Do the
tropes of alienation and sensual derangement so fundamental to modernist
aesthetic practices anticipate a generative principal embodied by certain
disabilities? To what extent, perhaps most importantly, do the bodies of specific
modernist practitioners necessitate innovation as a result of their embodiment?
Following this we will encounter a series of texts that may help us to
problematize “ableism”—any thinking or practice that essentializes human capability,
often in the service of the oppression of a particular group—and explore how
discourse about disability undergirds our most fundamental social, political,
ethical, and aesthetic practices. From these theoretical premises, we will move
to a robust discourse from the past 60 years regarding poetics and disability,
and encompassing a range of practices, communities, and cultures. Beauty is a Verb, a recently published
anthology edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northern, will help us to historicize
how discourse of and about disability has evolved, from early practitioners
such as Larry Eigner and Josephine Miles, to contemporary poets identified as
disabled, including Bartlett, Jordan Scott, David Wolach, Denise Leto, Amber DiPietra, and others. To what extent does disability radicalize poetry as a
field, especially claims for innovation traditionally made by an “avant-garde”
and its critical proponents? To what extent, as well, may a poetics of
disability help us to interrogate the ableist unconscious of modernity?
Required Texts
Beauty is a Verb
Hannah Weiner’s Open House
Jennifer
Bartlett’s Autobiography/Anti-autobiography
Amber DiPietra’s and Denise Leto’s Waveform
Jordan
Scott’s Blert
Highly Recommended:
Michael
Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand
Alison Kafer’s
Feminist Queer Crip
Petra
Kuppers’ The Scar of Visibility
Tobin
Siebers’ Disability Theory
Signing the Body Poetic
The Disability Studies Reader (4th Edition)
Schedule
Week 1
Readings: Selections from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Victor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (PDF)
Week 2
Readings: Selections from Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory and Michael Davidson’s
Concerto for the Left Hand (PDF)
Week 3
Readings: Selections from Robert Kocik’s Supple Science: “Overcoming Fitness” and
“Enwreathing Developmental Difficulty and the Feldenkrais Method” (PDF)
Week 4
Readings: Selections from Madeline Gins’ Helen Keller or Arakawa (PDF)
Week 5
Readings: Beauty
is a Verb pages 15-85
Week 6
Readings: Beauty
is a Verb pages 89-164
Week 7
Readings: Jennifer Bartlett’s Autobiography/Anti-autobiography and
Larry Eigner selections (PDF and online TBA)
Week 8
Readings: Aaron Williamson’s Hearing Things (PDF) and Signing
the Body Poetic selections (PDF)
Week 9
Readings: Hannah
Weiner’s Open House
Week 10
Readings: Beauty
is a Verb pages 257-365
Week 11
Readings: Selections from Eleni Stecopoulos’ Armies of Compassion and David Wolach’s Hospitalogy (PDFs)
Week 12
Readings: Jordan Scott’s Blert & Amber DiPietra’s and Denise Leto’s Waveform
Week 13
Readings: Introduction to Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip
Week 14
--Presentations
of final work.
______
Further Readings
Peter Reading’s C
Yosefa Raz’s “Reading Pain in
the Book of Job” (collected in The Book
of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics; ed. Batnitzky and Pardes)
