This talk will present a current intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at aesthetics through nonconforming bodies and minds. It also will offer a fresh understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor and welfare. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but this challenge has often been enabled by shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the 18th century modern aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a private sensory response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. As a test case for challenging an ideal of autonomy the presenter will consider a short play by Samuel Beckett, Rough for Theatre, which stages disabled characters in relationships of dependence and care.
Co-sponsored by UVa's Disability Studies Initiative and Department of English.