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From Tiny Tim to Helen Keller, disabled people in the nineteenth century were portrayed in sentimental terms, as afflicted beings whose sufferings afforded ablebodied people opportunities to practice empathy and compassion. In all kinds of representations of disability, from popular fiction to the reports of institutions established for the education and rehabilitation of disabled people, the equation of disability and sentimentality served a variety of social functions, from ensuring the continued existence of a sympathetic sensibility in a hard-hearted, market-driven world, to asserting the selfhood and equality of disabled adults. Unique in its focus on blindness and its examination of the interplay between institutional discourse and popular literature, Woeful Afflictions offers a detailed historical analysis of the types of cultural work performed by sentimental representations of disability in public reports and lectures, exhibitions, novels, stories, poems, autobiographical writings, and popular media portrayals from the 1830s through the 1890s in the United States. Woeful Afflictions combines contemporary scholarship on sentimentalism with the most recent works on the cultural meanings of disability to argue that sentimentalism, with its emphasis on creating emotional identifications between texts and readers, both reinforces existing associations between disability and otherness and works to rewrite those associations in portraying disabled people, in their emotional capacities, as no different from the ablebodied. This book will interest anyone concerned with disability studies and the social construction of the body, with the history of education and of public institutional care in the United States, and with autobiographical writings.
Illuminates the relationship between performance and the American charity movement
In the culture of the modern West, we see ourselves as thinking subjects, defined by our conscious thought, autonomous and separate from each other and the world we survey. Current research in neurology and cognitive science shows that this picture is false. We think with our bodies, and in interaction with others, and our thought is never completed. The Fiction of a Thinkable World is a wide-ranging exploration of the meaning of this insight for our understanding of history, ethics, and politics Ambitious but never overwhelming, carrying its immense learning lightly, The Fiction of a Thinkable World shows how the Western conception of the human subject came to be formed historically, how it contrasts with that of Eastern thought, and how it provides the basic justification for the institutions of liberal capitalism. The fiction of a world separated from each of us as we are separated from each other, from which we make our choices in solitary thought, is enacted by the voter in the voting booth and the consumer at the supermarket shelf. The structure of daily experience in capitalist society reinforces the fictions of the Western intellectual tradition, stunt human creativity, and create the illusion that the capitalist order is natural and unsurpassable. Steinberg’s critique of the intellectual world of Western capitalism at the same time illuminates the paths that have been closed off in that world. It draws on Chinese ethics to show how our actions can be brought in accord with the world as it is, in its ever-changing interaction and mutual transformation, and sketches a radical political perspective that sheds the illusions of the Western model. Beautifully conceived and written, The Fiction of a Thinkable World provides new ways of thinking and opens new horizons.
In the 1880s, a new medical term flashed briefly into public awareness in the United States. Children who had trouble distinguishing between similar speech sounds were said to suffer from "sound-blindness." The term is now best remembered through anthropologist Franz Boas, whose work deeply influenced the way we talk about cultural difference. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural history, Alex Benson takes the concept as an opening onto other stories of listening, writing, and power—stories that expand our sense of how a syllable, a word, a gesture, or a song can be put into print, and why it matters. Benson interweaves ethnographies, memoirs, local-color stories, modernist novels, silent film scripts, and more. Taken together, these seemingly disparate texts—by writers including John M. Oskison, Helen Keller, W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elsie Clews Parsons—show that the act of transcription, never neutral, is conditioned by the histories of race, land, and ability. By carefully tracing these conditions, Benson argues, we can tease out much that has been left off the record in narratives of American nationhood and American literature.
What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's Queequeg. This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual. Examining such texts as Typee, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, The Morgesons, Iola Leroy, and Contending Forces, Putzi relates the representation of the marked body to significant events, beliefs, or cultural shifts, including tattooing and captivity, romantic love, the patriarchal family, and abolition and slavery. Her particular focus is on both men and women of color, as well as white women-in other words, bodies that did not signify personhood in the nineteenth century and thus by their very nature were grotesque. Complicating the discourse on agency, power, and identity, these texts reveal a surprisingly complex array of representations of and responses to the marked body--some that are a product of essentialist thinking about race and gender identities and some that complicate, critique, or even rebel against conventional thought.
Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.
How did American geneticists go from fearing the dysgenic effects of deaf intermarriage to considering modern biotechnology a threat for Deaf culture? This book provides insight into changing ideas of what deafness is, what science and medicine should achieve, and to the transformative effect of exchange between scientists and deaf communities.
Arts Integration and Special Education contributes to research, policy, and practice by providing a theory of action for studying how linguistic, cognitive, and affective student engagement relates to arts integrated learning contexts and how these dimensions of engagement influence content area and literacy learning. Arts Integration and Special Education connects the interdisciplinary framework in human development and linguistics, special education, and urban education with primary action research by special educators trained in arts integration, working in an inclusive urban charter school with middle school age students. Upper elementary to middle-grade level student learning is relatively understudied and this work contributes across fields of special education and urban education, as well as arts education. Moreover, the classrooms in which the action research occurs are comprised of students with a diverse range of abilities and needs. The book’s interdisciplinary model, which draws on developmental and educational psychology, special education, and speech/language pathology research and practice, is the first to posit explanations for how and why AI contexts facilitate learning in students with language and sensory processing disorders, and those at-risk for school failure due to low socioeconomic status conditions.