Teaching & Learning Guide for: Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth-Century

Abstract

This guide accompanies the following article: Gabbard, Chris. Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth-Century. Literature Compass 8/2 (2011): 80–94. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00771.x Further Reading An important book coming out in 2011 that is bound to impact Disability Studies in the long 18th century is C. F. (Christopher) Goodey’s A Conceptual History of Intelligence and ‘Intellectual Disability’: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate). This book begins with the Protestant Reformation but emphasizes the four decades of the English Restoration. Examining poetry, drama, popular guides on conduct and behavior, medical treatises, and religious and philosophical works, Goodey reconstructs the socio-political and religious contexts of intellect and disability, demonstrating how these concepts became part of medicine and biology. In doing so, he challenges the standard model in which both ‘intelligence’ and ‘disability’ describe ‘natural,’ trans-historical realities and posits instead a view of intellectual disability and of the intellectually disabled person as cultural creations. This book will be important for the period’s scholars, especially those interested in the history of psychology and medicine and the social origins of human self-representation. Useful Links ‘C18-L’ (Resources for 18th-century studies across the disciplines) is the most important international, interdisciplinary forum for discussing all aspects of ‘the long 18th century’: . I also find extremely useful Jack Lynch’s (Rutgers University) labor of love: . Syllabus I offer one of my courses as an example of how to teach this material. More than an historical survey, ‘ “Monstrous Contingency”: Defect and Deformity in the Long Eighteenth-Century’ traces how present-day ideas concerning ability and disability, and especially of high intelligence and cognitive impairment, began coming into formation during the Age of Reason and reached their approximate modern definitions in the 19th century. In focusing on the history of representation of disabled figures, the course steers students away from assuming a ‘negative image school’ approach, that is, the practice of exposing the prejudices of ableist societies by bringing to light the derogatory, humiliating imagery associated with disability. Finding negative images is easy. Rather, the course directs students to seek out the subversive potential – the possibilities for transgressive reappropriation – of the hyperbolic meanings invested in disabled figures. In order to accomplish this goal, the course positions literary portraits of disability within their historical contexts. Because no set formula exists for accomplishing a transgressive appropriation of a seemingly negative image, the task is never easy and always requires ingenuity. Mitchell & Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000) is particularly helpful in guiding this effort. To capture the transitional nature of the period between the Early Modern and the Victorian, the course begins with Shakespeare’s Richard III and Milton’s Samson Agonistes, both of which dramatize juxtapositions between superstitious and rationalist understandings of bodily anomaly. Students then read and discuss (and research and write on one of) the following: John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator Papers (409, 411–421, and 392), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Bks 2 and 4), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, Samuel Johnson’s Life of Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Verses Addressed to the Imitator …’, William Hay’s Deformity, An Essay, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (Bk 4 excerpts) and Peri Bathos, and John Cleland’s Memoir of a Woman of Pleasure. The above readings hardly exhaust the possibilities for textual analysis employing disability studies in the long 18th century.