Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

FIRST PERSON

Rereading for Disability Studies

By Michael Bérubé ’82

Michael Bérubé ’82

Fifteen years ago, I came across a review essay in which I was described as a “whiz-bang manic trendy.” I had never seen “trendy” used as a noun before, and since the epithet as a whole sounded as if someone were chastising These Kids Today for their loud music and dangerous auto-hyphen-mobiles, I found it amusing enough to clip and keep.

But in recent years I find I’ve gotten only more manic and more trendy. Lately, I’ve been promoting the new subdiscipline of “disability studies” in the humanities, practically inviting the charge that I’m hopping on the latest academic bandwagon. You know, just when you thought there were no more “studies” programs to be added to the curriculum, after you’d finally (however enthusiastically or reluctantly) gotten acclimated to the presence of African-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Latino/a Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies on every major American campus, now there’s disability studies as well? Surely, one surmises, this latest add-on is the work of whiz-bang manic trendies.

It’s true that disability studies is a recent arrival: At Penn State, we’ve only begun to put together an undergraduate minor in disability studies, sifting through courses in philosophy, special education, communications disorders, gerontology and human development. But curiously, the study of disability is as pertinent to the ancient world as it is to the modern. At every point in our history, from the moment our species began to organize in social formations, those social formations have relied in part on ways of understanding and administering the many varieties of human embodiment.

That’s not to say that disability itself has been a stable category across the millennia. Quite the contrary. As Henri-Jacques Stiker writes in A History of Disability, “it would seem that for Greco-Roman antiquity the most acute problem was congenital malformation, the sole source of religious terror and the reason for fatal exclusion.” Deafness and blindness, by contrast, were not grounds for expulsion from the body politic; neither was mental retardation. Indeed, in some cases — Teiresias springs to mind — blindness was the outward index of an inward second sight (and this ascription of special powers to the blind remains part of popular culture today). “On one side,” Stiker notes, “congenital deformity is exposed; on another, mental illness is hidden but is not a cause for exclusion, with the possibility that it may bear a message for our world; on a third side, illness and adventitious disability are treated and cared for.”

The Christian Middle Ages in the West, by contrast, tended to see disability as a sign of God’s wrath or God’s grace — or as a matter for Christian charity, in which case it was not always clearly distinguished from poverty and abjection in general. The Enlightenment witnesses a new emphasis on deafness, as the developing Western states begin to place greater emphasis on language production as a salient criterion for belonging to the human community, and sign language becomes first an object of fascination (late 18th century), then a menace to society (late 19th century). Mental illness and mental retardation dominate much of 19th-century thought about intraspecies difference in the works of the Social Darwinists and in the policies of more benign social reformers, and catalogs of human impairment drive the new sciences of “population management.” In the turn-of-the-century United States, beliefs about physical and cognitive disability become central to debates about immigration and citizenship, and until the program of eugenics is discredited by Hitler’s Final Solution, it wins wide support from every point on the political spectrum.

I can’t do justice to the history of disability in two paragraphs, of course, but I do want to suggest that the terrain of disability studies didn’t appear ab nihilo a few weeks after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. The ADA is important for bringing a certain (though by no means sufficient) level of disability awareness to the public sphere, but the scholarly study of disability isn’t coextensive with the field of disability law. From the long-term view, the ADA represents just one more attempt by society to come to terms with varieties of human embodiment — in this case, by shielding some forms of embodiment from discrimination in employment.

It was the Roman playwright Terence, after all, and some academic whiz-bang manic trendy, who insisted that nothing human was alien to him. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto has stood as a motto for humanists ever since. The injunction seems especially appropriate when it comes to thinking about precisely those things that have made our fellow humans seem alien to us, from genetic anomalies to mental impairments. If disability studies teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that disability is ubiquitous and yet elusive, with implications for everything from dyslexia to dystopia, prosthetics to aesthetics.

I did not study disability during my College years. I was an English major, and I didn’t understand then — and did not understand for another decade — what the study of disability might have to do with the study of literature. Only when my second child was born with Down syndrome in 1991 did I begin to think seriously about all the branches of the human family. Now that child, Jamie, is 14, an avid learner with a love of marine mammals and the Harry Potter series, and has been teaching me what it means to be human ever since.

At Columbia, I read deeply and widely in the Western canon, with the result that when I began to encounter disability in literary studies and the humanities, I had 3,000 years of material to work with. I’m about to begin a project in which I look at the relations between cognitive disability and narrative, and I’m finding that self-reflexive narratives such as Don Quixote are every bit as relevant to my work as more obvious works such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. And where did I first read Don Quixote? In my Lit Hum class in spring 1980.

I could say that Columbia introduced me to the Western canon and converted me from a 17-year-old manic trendy to an earnest young man who understood the importance of taking the long view, but that wouldn’t be quite true. I came to Columbia from Regis High School, where I’d become acquainted with Plato and Aristotle, and a bit of Ovid and Virgil in the original. My Core courses at Columbia didn’t teach me to read the classics; they taught me something more valuable — how to reread the classics. Few 20-year-olds, in my experience as a college professor, see the value of rereading anything. As Roland Barthes memorably put it, rereading is “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people and professors).”

My Columbia professors taught me how to reread rigorously in medieval, early modern, early American and postmodern literature. But it wasn’t until my final year of study at Columbia, when I had the good fortune to take courses with Sacvan Bercovitch, Kathy Eden, W.T.H. Jackson and Ann Douglas, that I thought of pursuing a career in academe. It was dazzling to watch them at work, to be treated to and challenged by a sharpness of mind I found admirable and slightly terrifying. And in the course of inspiring me to become a teacher, they also taught me how valuable it is to expand those “marginal categories” of readers, to foster in our students the capacity not only for serious reading but for serious rereading. And they fostered in me the habits of mind that have enabled me to go back and reread classic works from the perspective of disability studies, as well. If you take the long view, after all, nothing human should be alien to us — and the project of rereading that injunction should last for as many human lifetimes as we can imagine.

Michael Bérubé ’82 grew up in New York, reading books and playing hockey (as a sophomore, he had hat tricks in four consecutive games for Columbia’s club team). He completed his graduate work in literature at the University of Virginia, where he met his wife, Janet Lyon; they married in 1985, were hired at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989 and moved to Penn State in 2001. They have two children, Nick (20) and Jamie (14). Bérubé has a weblog (www.michaelberube.com) and two forthcoming books: What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (September 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions: Humans and the Humanities (November 2006).

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next