Disability and autobiography: Enabling discourse (original) (raw)
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Autobiographical writing is a popular genre around the world because it allows for the sharing of personal tales and the development of ties between the writer and the reader. It is the expression of one's sentiments, emotions, and opinions via the lens of a life narrative. Autobiographies excite readers and frequently allow them to explore uncharted territory via the experiences and circumstances of another person. These encounters entice more readers to explore this genre. According to J. M. Coetzee 1 , "all autobiography is narrative, and all writing is autobiography." This statement demonstrates that each piece of writing by an author is related to their life in some way. Disabled auto/biography is one such sub-genre of auto/biography. Numerous readers are unaware of disabled authors' writings. These readers, the majority of whom are not disabled, do not see disability text as equal to that of other authors. "For one thing, significant disabilities may make it more difficult or impossible for individuals to write their own lives; the act of composition may just be too taxing. Even when disability is not an insurmountable barrier to writing, the literary/cultural marketplace shapes the genre in ways that may discourage life writing by disabled people" (Couser, 1997). At times, disabled autobiographies are viewed as a means of empowering and challenging the stereotypical portrayal of the disabled as medically objectified (Couser, 1997), or they are criticized for being excessively emotional or adhering to the standards prescribed for bourgeoisie individualism through the reproduction of hegemonic connections between disability and personal tragedies. The absence of disabled personal narratives creates a void in the genre due to the lack of variety. To ensure the survival of the autobiography genre, various sorts of stories by diverse authors should be welcomed without reservation. I think that all authors have a personal narrative to tell and should be given the opportunity. By ignoring a subgenre of auto/biography, we are denying the reader the opportunity to hear a different tale from a different perspective. This range of narrative styles lends a new level and complexity to the well-established genre.
Strangers Within: On Reading Disability Memoir
Life Writing, 2012
Once the domain of statesmen and war heroes, already-renowned writers and the soon-to-be-beatified, autobiography has become a democratic genre. Now it is not so much the powerful who write autobiography, but autobiography that confers the power of self-authorship upon the individual. In the act of telling our stories, we materialise. There is a degree of hubris in this impulse: we put ourselves centre-stage. But in claiming those life stories as legitimately told*in assuming an audience of persuadable, if not already sympathetic, readers*we might also defy stereotypes, resist the nullifying effects of those other, more dominant narratives in which we play but bit parts, relegated to the periphery. Much contemporary life writing participates in such reclamation projects, making subjects of people whose circumstances or characteristics may have denied them social agency. And so we write to reestablish a sense of perspective, to express something vital about our experiences that we hope will at once guarantee selfhood and create community. We call this autobiographical enterprise speaking out, making visible, giving voice, being heard, in language that seems almost inescapably corporeal*just as much psychoanalytic theory, and indeed our language of identity generally is also a bodily one. When we write (and do we not understand ‘writing’ as the hand that types, the eyes that read what’s there, the brain that thinks?), we write a life story into existence, and that story has a kind of physiological arc. We grow up to accumulate the expected markers of success in linear, or at least narratively dramatic, fashion, according to life cycles that are, by virtue of human aging, inherently physical. Along the way we see to believe. We’re taught to stand on our own two feet, follow in our forebears’ footsteps, Life Writing VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2012)
Against redemption: the dilemma of memoir
The pressure for commercially published memoirs to offer a tragedy-to-triumph redemptive arc is exacerbated when the memoir is about disability. I explore how I attempted to contest this narrative arc, using a thematic rather than chronological approach and adopting the personal essay form. I also unpack the role of metaphor in representing a disability such as autism and the complexities of writing from a sociocultural (rather than symbolic or medical) paradigm of disability. I examine one of the key dilemmas of writing a relational memoir and the creative judgements that the author must make.
When “Disability Demands a Story”: Problems with the ‘Unreliable’ Narrator
MUsings, 2018
Published in MUsings Spring 2018 The manner in which first-person narrators tell the reader their stories greatly impacts whether or not the reader views these narrators as trustworthy and reliable. In several cases, scholars and readers alike deem these narrators as “unreliable,” based on many different criteria within these stories that readers define as “true” or “factual.” Many scholars and readers take pleasure in scrutinizing the thoughts and actions of these narrators and evaluating what is in fact “true” within these sorts of narrations. Each of these “unreliable” narrators are categorized based on the underlying rationalization of their thoughts and actions; these are divided into four categories as defined by Riggan (1981). One of these classifications of the “unreliable” narrator is that of the “madman,” a narrator who suffers from a severe mental illness, and this impairment hinders the narrator’s ability to tell their story correctly (Riggan 133). However, a reading of these “madman” narrators through the lens of the social model of disability studies greatly impacts how the reader considers these narrators as “unreliable,” and ultimately questions how readers determine who is a “madman” and who is “sane.” As Michael Bérubé states, “disability demands a story” (43). I argue this perspective through an example of one of the narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.
The Excess of Autobiography: Texts, Paratexts, Contexts
2016
This paper is focused on the reconsideration of the limits and advances of the genre of autobiography. Given the recent boom in autobiography and personal narratives this timely topic poses a great challenge to current literary and cultural studies. Autobiography frequently takes the form of a disturbance, upsetting the expectations and classifications of both general public and literary critics. What presuppositions does the genre of autobiography build upon, and how should we respond when more strictly literary genres integrate autobiographical elements? This paper will explore selected, representative examples of how autobiography and autobiographically inclined literary works have challenged pervading norms over the last two centuries. The use of autobiographical elements in literature has repeatedly been part of an estranging revitalization of more or less settled literary forms, in addition to contributing to the reimagining of nationality through the example of representative or marginal identities, such as in the case of W. B. Yeats. The examples will span from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, via the 19th century call for uncompromising “sincerity” and the ensuing experiments of Modernism, to more recent instances of confessionalism in writers such as Robert Lowell and Karl-Ove Knausgård. The borders and dialogue between life and writing will be in focus in this paper, and the degree to which critical terms text, context and paratext help us understand and clarify their complex interaction will be subject to discussion.