Abstract
This essay examines the portrayal of a cognitive, age‐related disability in Norbert Scheuer’s novel Peehs Liebe (2012) vis‐à‐vis recent developments in cultural and literary disability studies. I argue that this disability text departs from reductive tropes and challenges the notion that selfhood is rooted in cognitive abilities. Scheuer presents an affirming alternative paradigm through the story of a disabled protagonist and his caregiver via engagement with concepts of love and the relational self, supported by quotes from Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion. This meditation on the possibility of narrative representation in the context of cognitive and age‐related disability grapples with the struggle for meaning that surrounds words and the characters’ emotional experience between reality and language. The analysis illuminates the novel’s deployment of the rhetorics of pseilos and apate, which underscore the importance of storytelling for people with age‐related disabilities and those who care for them.
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