Disability studies is a growing academic field. Since mid-2000s disability studies has increasingly challenged the perceived imperative of normality in terms of body and its relation with the social order of normalcy. Equally important to note is that the field itself has pushed against academic marginalization, even in critical discourse fields such as gender, queer, and race studies. Part of the challenge for disability studies has been to identify varieties and intersectional relations of impairments, stigmatization, and harassment within neoliberal local and global contexts. Yet the main challenge remains a theoretical one. How can we understand modernity beyond an ablest paradigm to which disability can take center stage in a more profound understanding of being modern?Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature offers an insightful approach in theorizing modernity, especially in its literary modernist manifestations, and the epistemologies that modernist awareness casts upon and beyond our assumptions about normative embodiments that continue to define modernity in several areas of inquiry. Informed by deaf cultural and visual studies, in particular ASL (American Sign Language), Rebecca Sanchez's work offers an original take on modernism as an aesthetic and literary movement, which arose in late nineteenth-century Europe. Modernist transgressions, according to Sanchez, are marked by ways to go beyond “communicative norms” (p. 26), norms that rely on embodiment in making language possible, through a distinct visual language that cancels out any notion of universal language as a product of abled bodies. The deaf culture produces a kind of knowledge that reveals a “range of interpretive possibilities for engaging modernism that also gesture outward, offering surprising insight into conversations, including those surrounding contemporary generic art, in which modernist studies has a great deal to contribute” (p. 152). The possibilities of language as embodied fragmentation, which modernity has been associated with, opens up to an understanding of literary performance that revolves around visual and temporal, which underline the modernist aesthetics beyond normative cultural and literary traditions.With four chapters, an introduction and an insightful epilogue, Deafening Modernism introduces the reader to an inventive critical deaf study of aesthetic and literary modernist works of Sherwood Anderson, Charles Chaplin, Charles Demuth, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein. With focus on such figures, tough not limited to them, Sanchez is not interested to explore deaf writers or literary characters, but ways embodied and visual language expose an alternative form of knowledge and expression. Sanchez works through the question of deaf epistemology and modernism through concepts of impersonality, primitivism, difficulty, and the image. In the first chapter, she examines the contentious relations between impersonality, following T. S. Eliot as disembodied status of the writer, and celebrity culture as authorial personalization of the author. Of importance in this chapter is the sophisticated discussion on the modernist clash between depersonal language and embodied subjectivity that depends on affective corporality, which so she argues defines the modernist texts ranging from W. B. Yeats to Sherwood Anderson. Sanchez's literary interpretation of Anderson from a disability approach is intriguing, as she registers the prominence of the body in language and literature.Chapter 2 continues the notion of embodied language with a shift of attention to how an understanding of modernism should be contextualized with the standardization of language. This chapter is conceptually and historically riveting for its discussion on deaf boarding schools and the institutional attempt to marginalize embodied discourses, especially at the educational sector at the beginning of twentieth century. Sanchez's interpretation of Charles Chaplin's Modern Times from a deaf studies perspective is original and invites the reader to reinterpret other key literary works in the era such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919). The underlying argument here is how primitive aesthetics challenged regulative measures through multilayered institutional and media practices in the early twentieth century.Chapter 3 examines the concept of modernist difficulty as juxtaposition and indeterminacy. The complex problem in the multiplicity of expressions is the defining feature of modernism by which, as Sanchez describes, fragmentation and montage persistently destabilize meaning. How ASL linguistics addresses the modernist difficulty is how the presence of body marked by an attentiveness to visuality allows it to become the focus. The simultaneous intersection of words, images, and bodies, for example, can be identified in the modernist works of Gertrude Stein, where visuality troubles language as a linear, disembodied practice. In this stimulating chapter, Sanchez also offers an intriguing account of the precisionist works of Charles Demuth and William Carlos Williams, where perception is both external and internal to the subject as a way to recognize its range of possibilities.Chapter 4 examines the concept of image. Understood as the language of images, ASL, Sanchez argues, repositions modernism with its cultural bases on images. With roots in the imagist poetry of Erza Pound and H.D., modernism's focus on visual image ties language to motion and ambiguity. How? In a section titled, “Palimpsestic Fiction,” Sanchez uncovers a reading of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) that emphasizes aurality and orality in literary discourse. For Sanchez, Faulkner's aurality reveals a deaf epistemology that operate through techniques of stream of consciousness in characters such as Benjy who ultimately pushes against the perils of communicative norms. Following chapter 4, the epilogue situates Deafening Modernism in several academic fields that endeavor to recognize the significance of embodied and visual languages. Here, the reader can find a concise summary of the book as Sanchez reminds us that meaning cannot be detached from body and, by and large, its contextualization in time and space. Communication breathes, and it does so as embodied acts, lived and sensually enacted, and hardly abstract. She writes “If bodies can be conceptualized as language—sequenced and even ‘rewritten’—so too can text be considered alive” (p. 152).As Deafening Modernism invites us to rethink American literature through the prism of disability studies, Sanchez should be recognized for writing a remarkable scholarly work with a unique historical and theoretical examination of ASL and death culture. However, by shifting emphasis away from identity-based conception of marginalized populations in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, she introduces a conception of literary modernity in terms of sociocultural practices of deaf embodiment. Such shift encourages the reader to reexamine assumptions about disability and yet more importantly how visual language can be embodied in shifting temporal contexts.Sanchez's advance for deaf critical discourse and ASL embodiment in reinterpreting American modernism offers an innovative way to negotiate embodied agency and standardization of language. Her notion of “communicative norms,” as discussed in chapter 2, is an original account that shows how the historical regularization of embodied practices cannot be decoupled from the standardization of language. Moreover, the modernist literary response to communicative norms opens up to new ways of understanding individuated and social experience of literary expression in affective and polyglot terms; but more importantly beyond nonidentitarian paradigm in how a marginalized group can be ascribed to oppression by virtue of disability.For anyone who might be suffering from an ability-biased approach on literary modernity and especially those suffering from a lack of deaf linguistic approach in disability studies, Deafening Modernism is a welcome contribution to how language can (or should be) be understood in its visual and embodied manifestations. At stake is the reconstruction of language as the body at the core of linguistic practices. Sanchez successfully demonstrates how modernism identifies alternative forms of embodied textual practices; her brilliant study is richly argued, erudite, and a multifaceted critique of normative epistemology. Broadly speaking, she connects us, the reader, abled or disabled, to the fragmentation, juxtaposition, and fragility of modernity. Deafening Modernism should be of considerable interest to literary theory, disability and cultural studies, but also to those who seek to see modernity beyond a normative project but rather an arena of political struggle.