Hi everyone,

We’re going to snap you out of exams mode for a moment to remind you about the upcoming autumn quarter.

If you haven’t yet selected your autumn English courses, worry not – there’s still plenty of exciting and enriching offerings available. Today we’d like to highlight Prof. Chris Eagle’s ENG 379 – Disability in Literature. See the full description via Prof. Eagle below:

For roughly three decades now, Disability Studies (or Disability Theory) has made its impact felt across the Humanities by challenging prevailing notions of the normal or able body and focusing our attention on the lived experiences of disabled individuals. Our primary goal in this course will be to understand how insights from the history and theory of disability can be critically applied to works of literature and film. Some of the issues this will raise in our discussions include the following: questions of identity related to the disabled body, the relation of disability activism to other forms of identity politics (race, class, and gender), the socially-constructed status of the normal or able body, the difference between social and medical models of disability, and the role that cultural representations play in assigning meaning to disability, illness, and disease. We will apply these questions to fictional narratives, poetry, and films which portray a variety of different physical and mental disabilities including paralysis, deformity, disfiguration, locked-in syndrome, schizophrenia, mutism, blindness, and deafness.

Understanding the perspectives of people of all types is one of the primary benefits of a Humanities major. This course looks like an excellent way to learn more about underrepresented members of society.