Comment from the Field

Abstract

On Thursday 4 June 2015, Lancaster University hosted Fictions of Corporeal Diversity, a symposium organized by Alan Gregory to highlight the growth of literary disability studies as an area of research. The programme featured a keynote address from Dr David Bolt, Associate Professor in the Department of Disability and Education and Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, and thirteen transhistorical, interdisciplinary papers from speakers across the United Kingdom. In A Path on the Periphery: The Way of Literary Disability Studies, Dr Bolt reviewed some of the pioneering works in the field and set about creating awareness of a tripartite model for literary disability studies. In his thought-provoking keynote he described a new way to consider representations of mental and physical difference, to move beyond approaches traditionally informed by normative positivisms or non-normative negativisms. Taking Brian Friel's play Molly Sweeney as a specific example, he demonstrated how the issues the text raises about blindness are often ignored or reduced to metaphor, which in turn serves to efface broader social and cultural issues connected to the lived reality of disability. Significantly, Bolt argued for a third approach. Considering the possibilities of exploring this text in terms of non-normative positivisms, Bolt asserted that the representation of disability, rather than being ignored or considered in a superficial way, could be engaged with productively. does not come down to tolerance and inclusion, he argued, but radical inclusion and profound appreciation. He went on to outline the important implications these ideas have in terms of curricula and the way texts are taught to students of all ages. Engaging with these issues, he explained, can highlight the fact that disability connects us all.Right from the outset this was a day of connections, expected and otherwise. The first panel memorably touched on two famous literary wrestling matches (Genesis 32 and the opening scene of Shakespeare's As You Like It, respectively) and wrestled in turn with early attitudes to disabled bodies both as sites to confirm heavenly ownership and as material challenges to the idea of transcendence. Kaye McLelland's paper Wrestling the Angel: Visions of the Disabled Body in Early Modern Sermons, explored the way disability in post-reformation England was closely connected to punishment and sin. In examining contemporary sermonizers' accounts of Jacob wrestling the angel and their tendency to describe him as halting to his grave (in an interesting revision of the original biblical account that does not indicate a permanent disability), McLelland asked questions about the way disability was regarded at the time. Was it in fact seen as a sign of reprobation, a punishment from God, or a symbol of his ownership? And is the sermonizers' revision of the story an indication that they were searching for an identity category that did not yet exist?In Recognising Shakespearean Disability, Susan Anderson stated her aims both to bring early modern and disability studies together, and to uncover the invisible norms that disability covers up. Rather than focus on references to disability in Shakespeare, Anderson looked at what disability qualifies by its absence. This led to a discussion of the hegemony of individualism, particularly the persistent myth of the lone genius-an ableist concept erasing the idea of interdependence, the necessity of society and the need for collaboration. The battles of wit encountered in so many of Shakespeare's plays, Anderson argued, are dependent on the fool who offers contrast, the construction of dependence as a kind of disability. Finally, since Shakespeare's name has erased the need to focus on the man, it is easy to forget that as well as considering the texts, it is also important to take account of the real bodies used to perform them.The second panel of the day brought together three papers exploring the representation of disability in genre fiction. …