“A spectacle and nothing strange”: Rebecca Sanchez's <em>Deafening Modernism</em>

Abstract

In Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature, Rebecca Sanchez argues that modernist texts by Anderson, Chaplin, Crane, H.D., Stein, and Williams can be read through the lens of a "crip epistemic insight" of deafness. By demonstrating how familiar modernist films, poems, short stories, and novels without thematic ties to deafness can be read in the manner of, for example, sign-language literature, Sanchez attempts to correct what she claims is the "mistaken belief that disability insight is only applicable" to "texts in which explicit references to disability or recognizably disabled bodies are present" (4). She attempts, in other words, to "Deafen" modernism.