About
"Literary Disability Aesthetics"
I plan to develop two articles that explore the unique aesthetic effects that disability affords literary art. In the first article, I argue that Claudia Rankine’s mixed-medie poetry collection Citizen uses aesthetic forms derived from disability to dramatize the Black female speaker’s attempt to make sense of the complex fabric of racist acts, objects, and attitudes that surround her. For the speaker, these stimuli produce allostatic overload, a term for the cumulative effects of prolonged stress on the body that produce multiple disabling symptoms. The collection itself, I argue, embodies and transmits a parallel logic and sensual experience of these disabling effects to the audience. The second article I will develop focuses on Susan Nussbaum’s novel good kings bad kings, a narrative set in a nursing home for disabled youth. This narrative uses seven different first-person narrators—a group that includes patients and non-patient employees across a range of ages and intersecting disability, racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. I plan to explore how this formal choice textually embodies the shifting social contexts that make disability legible in complex ways and that inflect how disabled people experience their lives.
Joshua Kupetz is a Lecturer II, English Language & Literature.
