Journal of Literary Disability, Vol. 1, No.

1, 2007

Introduction
David Bolt1

Journal of Literary Disability

The Journal of Literary Disability has arisen as a response to a series of interrelated absences, the most fundamental of which being that disability is implicitly and/or explicitly present in all literary works, but too frequently absent from literary criticism. This conspicuous absence invokes a parallel with what Jacques Derrida has referred to as hauntology, a neologistic variant on the word ontology that describes the paradoxical state of neither being nor non-being. In these terms, the critical absence from literary studies raises a spectre, because the presence of disability is neither denied nor acknowledged. All literary scholars analyse works in which disability is present, yet few engage with the subject on any level, let alone one that is critically informed by the discipline of disability studies. The result is that the discipline of literary studies is haunted by the spectre of disability in many ways. In the last decade or so, for example, I have studied literature at G.C.S.E, Access, B.A., MPhil., Ph.D., and postdoctoral levels, discovering numerous representations of disability at every turn. I was never absent from my English classes at Stoke-on-Trent College, and rarely so from those at the University of Staffordshire, but did not attend a single lesson, seminar, workshop, tutorial, or lecture that was informed by the discipline of disability studies. I was lucky enough to be educated by a host of brilliant scholars, many of whom were, and still are experts in the representation of gender, class, ethnicity, and/or sexuality, but none of whom had any expertise to impart about the representation of disability in particular. I encountered no resistance to my growing interest in the subject, indeed, many of my teachers supported, inspired, and continue to inspire me in my work, it is just that their research profiles did not include critical work on literary disability. This absence was not only notable because disability was present in all the set texts, as it always is, but also because for disabled students the University of Staffordshire was known to be by far the most accessible in the vicinity. That is to say, although the English department did not draw on the discipline of disability studies in the way that it drew on those of gender, Marxist, psychoanalytical, and post-colonial studies, disabled students were both welcomed and supported. It was nearly a decade ago that I enrolled as an undergraduate, which was before the Disability Discrimination Act became established in the U.K., but even then I took full advantage of screen-reading software, learning support workers, a talking lift, spending areas for my Guide Dog, and so on. I was also aware of some wheelchair access and translators for Deaf students. This manifest inclusiveness led me to suspect that the critical absence was not unusual, that it was typical of English departments in the British academy at the time. After all, if the discipline of disability studies was not acknowledged in such an inclusive English department, why would it be so elsewhere? In order to expand a little on this hypothesis of institutionalised curricular deficiency, I proceeded to review the websites of ninety-six institutions, a sample that was provided in the U.K. University Ranking/League Tables (2003). The results of the study, which I published in a short paper entitled Disability and the Rhetoric of Inclusive Higher Education, revealed that when advertising their undergraduate English courses, numerous British universities referred to literary criticism that was appreciative of ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender. In contrast, only one institution referred to disability in relation to course content, a lone reference that did not pertain to literary criticism; it was a notice that the field work aspects of the English course might have posed difficulties to disabled students, meaning that alternative arrangements would
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have to be made. The conclusion at which I arrived was that the scholars in these prestigious English departments were oblivious to the relevance of disability studies. Perhaps this inference was harsh, based on such a cursory study, but it was certainly the case that unlike feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytical approaches to literature, a disability studies approach was not posited as a selling point for the courses that were available at the time. It must be emphasised, then, that I am not criticising the English departments in which I was taught, have taught, and hope to teach again. The absence was, and still is standard in the vast majority of English departments throughout the U.K. and indeed the world beyond. I am well aware that in this respect the academy is far more advanced in, say, the U.S., as is reflected in the list of JLD board members, but as some of the articles in this issue will indicate, disability is still too frequently conspicuous by its absence. The University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Miami University, Ohio, and Ohio State University have exceptional English departments in so far as the relevance of disability studies is already appreciated. This exceptionality, however, is bound to be read as a rule of absence elsewhere in the American academy. It should also be stressed that during the last few years there has been progress in the British academy. For example, the University of Leeds has shown promise since the opening of its Disability Research Unit (DRU) in 1990, which recently became the interdisciplinary Centre of Disability Studies (CDS). This interdisciplinarity has obvious potential for scholars of literary disability, as is substantiated by the fact that one member of the CDS, Stuart Murray, is also a senior lecturer in the School of English. Because one of his main interests is in the representation of cognitive impairment, the school now boasts a research profile that refers to, 2 rather than raising the spectre of, disability. Indeed, this English departments research profile is one of the few in the U.K. that uses the word disability, referring to the fact that Stuart is editing 3 a forthcoming series of books about the representation of disability, health, and culture. Moreover, I have been reliably informed that a disability studies approach to literature is now being taught at the university on various core modules. That said, I am yet to come across a job vacancy anywhere in the British academy for an English lecturer who specialises in the representation of disability. The circularity of the problem is clear: if a disability studies approach to literature is not introduced to undergraduates, it is unlikely to be chosen as a research interest by those who progress to postgraduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral levels; but if scholars working at these levels are not specialising in the approach, they are less likely to provide undergraduates with a vigorous, profoundly informed introduction to the subject. These absences have perpetuated, and been perpetuated by, the same conspicuous absence of disability from many standard literary publications, including critical anthologies. So as not to obscure the progress of literary disability studies, I must emphasise that I was introduced to the pioneering work of Lennard J. Davis about five years ago, when my then doctoral superviser, Shaun Richards, spotted extracts from Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Putting aside the exciting content of the work, this discovery was particularly significant for me because I had come across several comparable anthologies in which disability was only present as a conspicuous absence. For example, I read David Maceys contemporaneous work, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, from start to finish, pleased to find that it contained hundreds of instructive references to feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytical theories, but frustrated to discover that disability studies was not mentioned once. While I did not expect the relatively new discipline to have the same presence as the others, this absence seemed remarkable in a dictionary of critical theory that was published at the brink of the twenty-first century. More recently, at the eleventh hour one might say, I conducted a comparative study of the online contents of a sample of literary publications. I was pleased to find that of the twenty-eight journals listed under the heading Literature on the Taylor and Francis website, twenty-five offered the option to search their online contents. To accentuate the positive again, I must point out that a search for references to disability in Prose Studies generated twenty-three results, including articles by literary disability scholars such as G. Thomas Couser, Stephen Kuusisto,
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and Mark Sherry. This number was by far the highest in the study, falling short, but perhaps understandably so, of the forty-three results that were generated by a comparable search for the word gender. I chose to use gender as a point of reference because it will be a sub-theme of many essays in this issue. Searches for disability in Journal of Poetry Therapy and Iranian Studies produced four results each, as opposed to nine and thirty-three for gender respectively. A search for disability in the online contents of LIT generated three results, contrasting with twenty-two references to gender. Atlantic Studies, Angelaki, and European Romantic Review each made a couple of references to disability, in contrast with five, sixteen, and forty-eight to gender. Indeed, Middle Eastern Literatures, Wasafiri, Shakespeare, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Third Text all made a single reference to disability, thereby helping to chase away the spectre, but again it should be noted that they made eight, thirteen, fifteen, nineteen, forty-nine, and sixty references to gender. In other words, while there was no comparison with, for example, gender, disability was present in the online contents of thirteen of the twenty-five literary journals. Though quite promising, bearing in mind that the discipline of disability studies is still relatively new, these results revealed a contrast between the literary appreciation of disability and that of gender not to mention ethnicity, sexuality, and class that went some way to justifying the introduction of JLD. However, there were yet more absences to consider, because the twelve remaining searches for the word disability generated not few, but no results. Two of these absences were less concerning than the rest in so far as the online contents of Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts and Scando-Slavica contained references to neither disability nor gender. That is to say, the absence of disability was less conspicuous than it was in the remaining ten 4 journals, which made between five and ninety-three references to gender. It was from this array of publication, curricular, and epistemological absences that the Journal of Literary Disability arose as an idea, which became a reality when forty of the worlds top literary disability scholars agreed to join the editorial board; when Jim Ferris, Michael Davidson, and Lucy Burke agreed to co-edit the first three issues respectively; when dozens of authors submitted proposals and articles; when Stephen Bolt and Jane Goetzee agreed to help with graphic design and copy editing; when Irene Rose, Rebecca Mallett, and Claire Molloy agreed to host the launch at the Conference of the Cultural Disability Studies Research Network ; and when hundreds of readers subscribed in advance of this, the inaugural issue. The enthusiasm of everyone involved is indicative of the fact that the publication of a journal that focuses on the literary representation of disability has been long overdue.

Disability and/as Poetry

The idea of Disability and Poetry as the theme for this issue was conceived by various members of the editorial board. Petra Kuppers has been a driving force from the start, and it was she who suggested a special issue about poetry that would help to introduce literary disability to literary scholars. Though in agreement with the introductory nature of this theme, Ellen Samuels proposed changing it to Disability and/as Poetry, a modification that was inspired by the much quoted statement from the poet, dancer, and artist Neil Marcus: Disability is an art. It's an ingenious way to live (qtd. in DIRC). Ellens thinking was that by recasting Disability and Poetry into Disability as Poetry, the issue might help to invert the expectation that poetry by or about disabled people is bound to be tragic or insipidly inspirational. Instead, it might be recognised that poetry can arise from the generative experiences of people with unusual, unexpected, and/or unruly bodies and/or minds. Because this approach has been exemplified in the award-winning poetry of Jim Ferris, which links aesthetic value with the bodily experience of disability, he was an obvious choice when it came to finding a co-editor for the issue. Accordingly, his editorial influence will be felt throughout these pages, his work discussed in a number of the articles, and some of his thoughts about poetry imparted in the concluding essay. The issue will also benefit from invaluable
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editorial advice that has been provided by literary disability scholars such as Johnson Cheu, Michael Davidson, Lennard Davis, Anne Finger, Chris Gabbard, Ryan Knighton, and Robert McRuer. The first, second, and third essays will provide something of an introduction to the theme of the issue. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell will examine the language of haunting that is used in Robert Pinskys argument that American poetry is constitutive of a uniquely American memory. They will revisit mid-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century poems by Abraham Lincoln and William Carlos Williams with an emphasis on the representation of disability. Nicole Markoti will analyse two early-twentieth-century poems, the first by the British poet Wilfred Owen, the second by the Canadian poet Earle Birney. Building on Mitchell and Snyders narrative theory, the essay will argue that disabled characters are spectres of nondisabled people, employed to bolster the narrative lesson that the perfect body should be celebrated, the imperfect body, discarded. The imperfect body in each of the examples happens to be male, raising gender issues that will be a sub-theme in the subsequent essays reading of a selection of contemporary poems by Mark O'Brien, Stephen Kuusisto, Floyd Skloot, and Jim Ferris. In analysing these poems Petra Kuppers will celebrate the presence of disability as an aesthetic practice, tracing the way in which the nature sublime, interpenetration and access are poetically modulated and transformed. The fourth, fifth, and sixth essays will provide more specialised readings in so far as each will focus on the work of a single poet. Tammy Berberi will revisit the late-nineteenth-century French poet Tristan Corbire, who has previously been remembered more for his ill health than the innovative verse in his collection Yellow Loves. That is to say, though largely unsubstantiated, a pathologized composite of chronic swelling in the extremities, rheumatic fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, deafness, visual impairment, sexual impotence, neurosis, and unattractiveness has haunted previous studies of Corbire. This essay, however, will make way for a re-evaluation of the poet and his work, revealing a parody of the disparagement to which they have been subjected. Sue Schweik will focus on the twentieth-century American poet Josephine Miles, whose poems powerfully and cryptically grapple with disability and gender ideology. Departing from Mitchell and Snyders emphasis on narrative theory, the essay will map out some exploratory paths toward a social philology of disability and gender. The appreciation of the fact that subjectivities are always multiply inflected will resonate with the subsequent essay, in which Lucy Burke will consider the British poet Tony Harrisons latetwentieth-century filmic exploration of poetry as a form that salvages meaning from the unknowable experience of profound cognitive impairment. She will argue that in representing the hospitalised experience of a group of women with Alzheimers disease alongside spectres of their earlier selves, Harrison implies that there is a poetry to dementia, or even that dementia is a form of poetry in so far as it strips away life narratives, revealing a core of fragments that crystallise the dispositions and characteristics of personhood. Written largely from a poets perspective, the final essays will provide a more subjective approach to the theme of disability and/as poetry. Stephen Kuusisto and Petra Kuppers will collaborate in a dialogic essay that combines lyrical, poetic, and analytical responses to a photographic representation of disability with a commentary on these responses. The premise is that disability is not only a lived experience of individuality and difference, it is also the hidden term, the shadow behind many emancipatory politics. Informed by this awareness, the experimental essay will play with the boundaries of literature and criticism, juxtaposing prose and poetry in an endeavour to release the disabled subject, in this instance a blind man, from his age-old vestments. The last word will go to the co-editor of the issue, Jim Ferris, whose performative and elliptical essay will use prose and verse to consider the poetic significance of rhythm, expanding on the hypothesis that poetry is not monologue but conversation, and conversations always have rhythms. The subjectivity of these final essays will point the reader back to the first, which David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder will conclude with a discussion of various post-war novelists who break with the tradition of poetic tropes that treat disability as a metaphor for cultural collapse. Taken collectively, these works will be found to begin an earnest tradition of exploration into
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disability subjectivity. This subjectivity is certainly demonstrable in the contemporary poetry of Jim Ferris, as in that of Stephen Kuusisto, Petra Kuppers, Nicole Markoti, Johnson Cheu, Josephine Miles, Mark O'Brien, Floyd Skloot, Neil Marcus, and so on. These poets demonstrate that disability is an art, as Neil Marcus has put it, that disabled lives can be poetic experiences. In other words, their work is not haunted by the spectre, but informed by the experience of disability. To invoke Derrida again, one might say that the hauntology of disability is displaced by the ontology of disabled people. This embodiment is a fundamental aspect of the literary disability movement to which the following essays will contribute, a movement that is turning conspicuous absences into a real presence in the academy.

Notes
1

The introduction was presented and the journal launched by Dr. David Bolt at the Inaugural Conference of the Cultural Disability Studies Research Network, Liverpool John Moores University, May 26, 2007. Thanks are due to Lucy Burke, Jim Ferris, Jane Goetzee, Peter Heaney, and Petra Kuppers, who took the time to read this introduction prior to its publication.

Thanks to Martin Halliwell, Lucy Burke, and Irene Rose respectively, the University of Leicester, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Liverpool John Moores University are also among the small but growing number of institutions in the U.K. that are contributing to the literary disability studies movement. Stuart Murray is currently editing a series of books for Liverpool University Press, Representations: Disability, Health and Culture, and working on his own contribution: Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. The online contents of Studia Neophilologica make five references to gender; Journal of Postcolonial Writing, six; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, six; Ibsen Studies, nine; Folklore, eleven; European Journal of English Studies, sixteen; English Studies, twenty-two; Interventions, thirty-seven; Textual Practice, fifty-five; and Women's Writing, ninety-three. No references are made to disability.

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Works Cited
Bolt, David. Disability and the Rhetoric of Inclusive Higher Education. Journal of Further & Higher Education 28.4 (2004): 353-58. Centre of Disability Studies. University of Leeds. Apr. 20, 2006. Mar. 5, 2007 <www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/>. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London, New York: Verso, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Disability Information and Resource Centre. 2001. Apr. 9, 2007 <www.dircsa.org.au/index.cfm?fuseaction=dirc.disability>. Leitch, Vincent B., William E. Cain, Laurie Finke, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffrey J. Williams, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York and London : W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2001. Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. 2000. London: Penguin, 2001. Taylor and Francis Journals. 2007. Mar. 13, 2007 <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journals.asp?subcategory=AH450000>. U.K. University Ranking/League Tables. United Kingdom Student News. 2003. Oct. 20, 2003 <www.ukstudentnews.co.uk>.

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