Disability Ecology: Re-Materializing U.S. Fiction from 1890-1940

Abstract

Disability Ecology: Re-Materializing U.S. Fiction from 1890-1940 argues that disability is the material-semiotic product of an ecological network of human and non-human actors. As social forms, disability ecologies move across contexts, including the non-literary and the literary, to structure disability subjectivities, attach meaning to textualizations of nonnormative embodiments, and produce other effects particular to a given milieu. The introduction, “Returning to Bodies: Disability, Ecology, and Literary Disability,” proposes a model of disability that is distinct from extant essentialist and social models for the equal agentic capacities it grants to nonnormative embodiments and to cultural actors. Chapter one, “Disability, Subjects, Ecology,” develops the concepts of disability ecology and its relationship to disability subjectivities, and it argues that the disability ecologies in literary texts act as heuristics for the examination of the actors that structure disability subjectivities. Chapter two, “The Spectacular Banality of Literary Disability,” theorizes how the deployment of disability for egalitarian ends in realist fiction by William Dean Howells and Charles Chesnutt in fact produces discursive subjugation. Chapter three, “Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Crip Gesture of Naturalism,” coordinates analyses of proto-eugenic practices of medical classification that depended on biopolitical aesthetic criteria and the aesthetic projects of naturalist fiction by Frank Norris and Edith Wharton that reify subordinating concepts of disability even as they foreground impairment as a universal condition of human being. Chapter four, “Disability Kitsch, Literary Inclusionism, and the Crip Art of Aesthetic Failure,” argues that representations of disability in literary art tend toward kitsch, yet as kitsch such representations wield an expressive power that marginalizing discourses cannot contain. Through analyses of texts by Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway, the chapter further develops an idea of post-thematic disability aesthetics, meaning the application of disability themes to experimental literary forms in the absence of representation.