Spring 2020 Update 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Spring 2020 Update [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG (0122) 205 - Disability in Literature


Credits: 3.00

Students will analyze the representation of disability in literature through a multidisciplinary analysis of the politics of disability.  Class readings and discussions will focus on how the recognition and representation of disability is often the result of cultural anxieties that intersect with similarly socially constructed identities such as race, gender and sexuality. 

Through formal and informal essay responses, class participation, and reading quizzes, students will:

● Identify and critique competing definitions of disability;

● analyze and evaluate literary texts using disability studies as a critical lens;  

● evaluate disability not just as a medical construction, but also as a social one that often intersects with the social constructions of gender, race and sexuality;  

● understand that the present disability rights movement has a history insofar as it seeks to correct past, as well as present attempts to define embodied and cognitive forms of difference as abnormal or deviant ways of being;    

● craft thesis-driven, analytical essays on a number of issues within the field of disability studies and literary analysis;  

● integrate critical and scholarly articles from the field of disability studies into their own research; 

● evaluate the worth of interdisciplinary approaches to literary analysis and medical categories