2020/04/01 by Jeremy Colangelo · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism #Modernist Literature and Criticism #Disability studies #Blindness #Realism #Mythology #Epistemology #Representation (politics) #Aesthetics #Sociology #Psychology #Psychoanalysis #Philosophy #Literature #Gender studies #Art
paper · doi:10.1215/00166928-8210737
published in Genre 53(1), 1-25 (Duke University Press)
openalex publication_date 2020/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Although disability studies researchers have long recognized the interdependence of ability and disability as socially mediated categories, few studies have taken the next logical step of examining how ability is constructed and represented in literary texts. This article pursues that line of inquiry through an analysis of the representation of vision and its limitations in James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguing that the textual construction of ability arises through the myth of the diaphanous abled body—or the assumption that nondisabled experience occurs absent bodily interference—as it relates to an analogous formal process here named the sensorytextual screen. The author shows how presumptions of what constitutes an abled body inflect the (dis)abled realism of Joyce’s novel, which at once depicts and mocks ableist presumptions. Representations of blindness, sight, and low vision thus relate intimately with modernist experiments with description and literary point of view and do so at a very fundamental level.