Mon. 7:00-9:45. Professor Kathleen Béres Rogers. Meets at College of Charleston.
(Fulfills a British Literature after 1800 requirement)
The concept of the “norm” was first developed in nineteenth-century statistics; specifically, Adolphe Quetelet introduced the notion of the “normal man.” This begs not only the obvious question of gender (is the woman “abnormal?”) but also the question of what, exactly, a “normal” body might be. Although what we call “disability” has always existed in various constructions, the nineteenth century is a time when disabilities are being classified, medicalized, and even placed onto a hierarchy. Using Tobin Siebers’ 2008 Disability Theory, as well as other broadly disability studies, feminist, and new historicist articles, this course will examine how “disability” is being constructed in nineteenth-century medical, proto-psychological, and literary discourses. Texts will include texts about bodily disability (selections from Selections from The Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Lord Byron’s The Deformed Transformed, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss); texts about blindness (selections from James Holman, the Romantic-era “blind traveller,” Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and Frances Browne’s poems); texts about deafness (from Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sick-Room, William Henry Simpson’s Daydreams of the Deaf, and Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek), and texts about intellectual disability (William Wordsworth, “The Idiot Boy,” and Charles Dickens, “The Happy Idiot” and Little Dorritt).
In this course, we will not only read literary criticism and write the standard article-length research paper, but we will also practice ways in which we can approach these texts creatively, integrating them into our own poetry and/or fiction.
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