Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:51:59.740Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Disability and Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Bérubé
Michael Bérubé*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.

Type
Conference on Disability Studies and the University
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 2 , March 2005 , pp. 568 - 576
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove, 1955.Google Scholar
Berube, Michael. “Disability, Democracy, and the New Genetics.” Genetics, Disability, and Deafness. Ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Sean Young, and Rutger Hauer. Warner, 1982.Google Scholar
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. John H. Fisher. New York: Holt, 1977.Google Scholar
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Ray, 1996.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 1995.Google Scholar
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: Vintage, 1984.Google Scholar
Finding Nemo. Dir. Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich. Perf. Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, and Alexander Gould. Pixar, 2003.Google Scholar
Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment. Ed. Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon Mc-Kenzie. New York: Harcourt, 1958. 379–92.Google Scholar
Gattaca. Dir. Andrew Niccol. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. Columbia, 1997.Google Scholar
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. London: Vintage, 2004.Google Scholar
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1976.Google Scholar
Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Joe Pantoliano. Columbia, 2000.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David T., and Snyder, Sharon L. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.Google Scholar
Monk. Created by Andy Breckman. Perf. Tony Shalhoub and Bitty Schram. USA Network, 2002.Google Scholar
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18.10.1093/screen/16.3.6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar, 1995.Google Scholar
Rain Man. Dir. Barry Levinson. Perf. Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, and Valeria Golino. MGM, 1988.Google Scholar
Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability. Trans. William Sayers. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, David. “Mongols in Our Midst: John Langdon Down and the Ethnic Classification of Idiocy, 1858-1924.” Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader. Ed. Steven Noll and James Trent. New York: New York UP, 2004. 92–119.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Perennial, 1998.Google Scholar
X-Men. Dir. Bryan Singer. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Hugh Jackman, and Famke Janssen. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000.Google Scholar
Zola, Irving. “‘Any Distinguishing Features?‘ The Portrayal of Disability in the Crime-Mystery Genre.” Policy Studies Journal 15 (1987): 487–513.10.1111/j.1541-0072.1987.tb00726.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar