Language as Prosthesis: The Re-embodiment of Four Disabled Authors

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Keywords

Re-embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Language Poets

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Within the works of four disabled authors, language reveals itself as a prosthetic sense organ. As prosthesis, language is of the body, participating in an ongoing process of re-embodiment wherein the relationship between the disabled author and the world is affected by his writing. French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a framework for understanding the constitution of a body-subject in its sensuous dialogue with the world. Influenced by the philosophical works of Merleau-Ponty, among others, a group of American writers calling themselves "Language poets" seek to reveal language as our primary mode of perception. While their individual projects deviate from one another significantly, the Language poets' shared interest in complicating the relationship between language and authenticity drives a unified representation of authorial voice as the representation of a participation in a set of pre-existing discourses. Charles Bernstein, a prominent writer associated with the Language poets, claims that identity is constructed linguistically. While Bernstein and his colleagues enable an approach to texts that focuses on style rather content, they are interested in language and not its relationship to the body. Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the intertwining of the body with language, as addressed in his essay, "The Intertwining: The Chiasm," suggests an approach to the presence of the body that unifies the text, while remaining imperceptible. The authors that I will address are: Jordan Scott, a Canadian poet with a stutter, Larry Eigner, an American poet with cerebral palsy, Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor who wrote a memoir while suffering from locked-in syndrome, and Christopher Nolan, an Irish author with cerebral palsy.

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