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Papers by VIVIAN DELCHAMPS WOLF

Tuxedo, 2023

This essay explores dance and poetic articulations of disabled life. It connects Emily Dickinson'... more This essay explores dance and poetic articulations of disabled life. It connects Emily Dickinson's dashes to balletic movements like the rond de jambe, which symbolize both fluidity and resistance to stillness. Delchamps ponders the experiences of pain and ableism, reflecting on her own diagnoses of rheumatoid arthritis and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The article ultimately delves into the broader implications of medical bias and the importance of disability identity, advocating for a shift in focus from curing conditions to promoting access.

Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. , 2023

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2019

Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities, 2023

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2021

“Rattlesnake Kinship” demonstrates that disability studies and Native American and Indigenous Stu... more “Rattlesnake Kinship” demonstrates that disability studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies have much to offer each other through attention to anti-ableist frameworks for valuing human and nonhuman life. The article further suggests that animal studies can more wholly connect these fields by challenging inextricably connected oppressions towards racialized, disabled, and animalized beings. Responding to disability studies and critical animal studies scholar Sunaura Taylor’s Beast of Burden and Cherokee and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge, the article attends to diverse meanings of rattlesnakes by first examining historical Western practices of exclusion and extermination and then (a few of many) Indigenous perspectives. The Hopi Snake Dance, for example, destabilizes white settler constructed categories by temporarily reconfiguring the boundaries of the body. This essay explores this entanglement of human and rattlesnake bodies to consider and challenge the harm ableism does to beings that Western culture has deemed pestilent, pitiful, and dangerous to human life.

Conclusion 109 Works Cited 113 I'm also deeply grateful to my family and friends for their suppor... more Conclusion 109 Works Cited 113 I'm also deeply grateful to my family and friends for their support during my time at Scripps.

Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, 2020

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan, 2018

“Teaching Poetry Through Dance” draws upon the similarities between dance and poetry to recommend... more “Teaching Poetry Through Dance” draws upon the similarities between dance and poetry to recommend inclusive and innovative pedagogical practices. Delchamps analyzes poems by writers Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, attesting that such poems take on new meaning when studied alongside videos of dance performances. She further claims that dance teaching methodologies help students learn to study a poem’s form, content, narration, and style. Students think differently about a poem when it is performed; Delchamps therefore recommends kinesthetic, visual, audible, and tactile exercises that work in various teaching environments and for students with diverse learning styles.

“Just as [Angela] Sorby and [Tracy] Thomson discovered that the subjective/objective dichotomy between poetry and chemistry broke down during their in-class dialogues, so too in Chap. 3, ‘Teaching Poetry Through Dance,’ does “Vivian Delchamps underline ‘the importance of unsettling the binary that presents mind and body as distinct.’ Both of these chapters (as well as this book) take issue with the compartmentalization of subjects in every meaning of the word. Delchamps discusses how the contemporary education system polices student bodies by making them increasingly more sedentary as they advance through the grades. By incorporating dance methodologies into the poetry classroom, she shows how poetry can and should be embodied, and how students can benefit in terms of both mental and physical health by combining poetry with dance. Her interdisciplinary methods promote a return to bodily agency in learning, which is seen as especially valuable for students of different ranges of mobility and students of color” (Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan, xviii).

Book Reviews by VIVIAN DELCHAMPS WOLF

Modern Philology, 2023

Something that is "generative" has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Th... more Something that is "generative" has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Thomas Constantinesco's exciting book Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, the author emphasizes that pain is not solely destructive (as many tired frameworks suggest). The book's framing of pain in the context of nineteenth-century history opens new avenues for understanding pain as a generative, active force that catalyzes creative experiments with literary form, narrative, and genre. Specifically, Constantinesco demonstrates that literary texts engage with and veer away from the dominant form used to understand pain in the nineteenth centurysentimentalism. Literature generates new knowledge about pain precisely because it does not merely use pain to foster empathy. Rather, literature complexly theorizes the problems of selfhood, identity, and language that emerge in pain's wake. With this argument, Writing Pain contributes to historical literary scholarship and to pain studies-an interdisciplinary field that explores pain's cultural and social contexts. Elaine Scarry famously argued in The Body in Pain (1987) that pain is unnarratable, unspeakable, and untranslatable. Constantinesco builds on and challenges Scarry's ideas, asserting that pain is not merely a hindrance to language but is rather a fertile ground for the emergence of poetic expression. Like Michael Snediker, who deploys figuration to explore chronic pain in his wonderful book Contingent Figure (2021), Constantinesco argues that pain can transform language even when the resulting figures resist complete understanding. While Constantinesco and Snediker develop complementary ideas about pain, Constantinesco differs slightly from Snediker by asserting that literary

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2021

Pacific Coast Philology: Journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, 2020

In this impressive work of historical research and literary analysis, Sari Altschuler argues that... more In this impressive work of historical research and literary analysis, Sari Altschuler argues that literature and the imagination were vital to the production of medical knowledge in early America and must be acknowledged in the health professions today. The Medical Imagination shows that before the founding of the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education ( ) and the release of the Abraham Flexner Report ( ), strict divides between the humanities and medicine did not exist. Rather, in early America, "medical knowledge was understood to be formed in the mind of the brilliant observer-not through depersonalized, objective observation" ( ). Altschuler compares the philosophies of physicians who were also fiction writers and poets, demonstrating that physicians found that crafting literature offered chances for them to explore some of the most difficult problems of the body during tumultuous times of change. The book's imaginative approach to literature and health will likely attract a multidisciplinary audience

Tuxedo, 2023

This essay explores dance and poetic articulations of disabled life. It connects Emily Dickinson'... more This essay explores dance and poetic articulations of disabled life. It connects Emily Dickinson's dashes to balletic movements like the rond de jambe, which symbolize both fluidity and resistance to stillness. Delchamps ponders the experiences of pain and ableism, reflecting on her own diagnoses of rheumatoid arthritis and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The article ultimately delves into the broader implications of medical bias and the importance of disability identity, advocating for a shift in focus from curing conditions to promoting access.

Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. , 2023

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2019

Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities, 2023

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2021

“Rattlesnake Kinship” demonstrates that disability studies and Native American and Indigenous Stu... more “Rattlesnake Kinship” demonstrates that disability studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies have much to offer each other through attention to anti-ableist frameworks for valuing human and nonhuman life. The article further suggests that animal studies can more wholly connect these fields by challenging inextricably connected oppressions towards racialized, disabled, and animalized beings. Responding to disability studies and critical animal studies scholar Sunaura Taylor’s Beast of Burden and Cherokee and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge, the article attends to diverse meanings of rattlesnakes by first examining historical Western practices of exclusion and extermination and then (a few of many) Indigenous perspectives. The Hopi Snake Dance, for example, destabilizes white settler constructed categories by temporarily reconfiguring the boundaries of the body. This essay explores this entanglement of human and rattlesnake bodies to consider and challenge the harm ableism does to beings that Western culture has deemed pestilent, pitiful, and dangerous to human life.

Conclusion 109 Works Cited 113 I'm also deeply grateful to my family and friends for their suppor... more Conclusion 109 Works Cited 113 I'm also deeply grateful to my family and friends for their support during my time at Scripps.

Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, 2020

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan, 2018

“Teaching Poetry Through Dance” draws upon the similarities between dance and poetry to recommend... more “Teaching Poetry Through Dance” draws upon the similarities between dance and poetry to recommend inclusive and innovative pedagogical practices. Delchamps analyzes poems by writers Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, attesting that such poems take on new meaning when studied alongside videos of dance performances. She further claims that dance teaching methodologies help students learn to study a poem’s form, content, narration, and style. Students think differently about a poem when it is performed; Delchamps therefore recommends kinesthetic, visual, audible, and tactile exercises that work in various teaching environments and for students with diverse learning styles.

“Just as [Angela] Sorby and [Tracy] Thomson discovered that the subjective/objective dichotomy between poetry and chemistry broke down during their in-class dialogues, so too in Chap. 3, ‘Teaching Poetry Through Dance,’ does “Vivian Delchamps underline ‘the importance of unsettling the binary that presents mind and body as distinct.’ Both of these chapters (as well as this book) take issue with the compartmentalization of subjects in every meaning of the word. Delchamps discusses how the contemporary education system polices student bodies by making them increasingly more sedentary as they advance through the grades. By incorporating dance methodologies into the poetry classroom, she shows how poetry can and should be embodied, and how students can benefit in terms of both mental and physical health by combining poetry with dance. Her interdisciplinary methods promote a return to bodily agency in learning, which is seen as especially valuable for students of different ranges of mobility and students of color” (Poetry and Pedagogy Across the Lifespan, xviii).

Modern Philology, 2023

Something that is "generative" has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Th... more Something that is "generative" has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Thomas Constantinesco's exciting book Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, the author emphasizes that pain is not solely destructive (as many tired frameworks suggest). The book's framing of pain in the context of nineteenth-century history opens new avenues for understanding pain as a generative, active force that catalyzes creative experiments with literary form, narrative, and genre. Specifically, Constantinesco demonstrates that literary texts engage with and veer away from the dominant form used to understand pain in the nineteenth centurysentimentalism. Literature generates new knowledge about pain precisely because it does not merely use pain to foster empathy. Rather, literature complexly theorizes the problems of selfhood, identity, and language that emerge in pain's wake. With this argument, Writing Pain contributes to historical literary scholarship and to pain studies-an interdisciplinary field that explores pain's cultural and social contexts. Elaine Scarry famously argued in The Body in Pain (1987) that pain is unnarratable, unspeakable, and untranslatable. Constantinesco builds on and challenges Scarry's ideas, asserting that pain is not merely a hindrance to language but is rather a fertile ground for the emergence of poetic expression. Like Michael Snediker, who deploys figuration to explore chronic pain in his wonderful book Contingent Figure (2021), Constantinesco argues that pain can transform language even when the resulting figures resist complete understanding. While Constantinesco and Snediker develop complementary ideas about pain, Constantinesco differs slightly from Snediker by asserting that literary

Disability Studies Quarterly, 2021

Pacific Coast Philology: Journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, 2020

In this impressive work of historical research and literary analysis, Sari Altschuler argues that... more In this impressive work of historical research and literary analysis, Sari Altschuler argues that literature and the imagination were vital to the production of medical knowledge in early America and must be acknowledged in the health professions today. The Medical Imagination shows that before the founding of the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education ( ) and the release of the Abraham Flexner Report ( ), strict divides between the humanities and medicine did not exist. Rather, in early America, "medical knowledge was understood to be formed in the mind of the brilliant observer-not through depersonalized, objective observation" ( ). Altschuler compares the philosophies of physicians who were also fiction writers and poets, demonstrating that physicians found that crafting literature offered chances for them to explore some of the most difficult problems of the body during tumultuous times of change. The book's imaginative approach to literature and health will likely attract a multidisciplinary audience