{"product_id":"distressing-language-9781479813841","title":"Distressing Language","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe role of disability and deafness in art Distressing Language is full of mistakeserrors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry.  Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of \"sounding good\"? Distressing Language grows out of the author's experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge.    Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim's audiovisual installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are working with the axiom of \"error\" to produce novel subjecthoods and possibilities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on his own experience of increasing deafness, Davidson provides an engrossing look\u003cbr\u003e into the ways that slips or unusual forms of language can unexpectedly lead to new meanings and\u003cbr\u003e beauty. Distressing Language expertly weaves together modern poetry and fiction, popular\u003cbr\u003e culture, sign language art, theory, politics, and history, and is often as funny as it is profound.\u003c\/p\u003e * Christopher Krentz, author of \u003ci\u003e Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature \u003c\/i\u003e *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eA highly original account of language, meaning, and sound, all framed through hearing loss. In\u003cbr\u003e Davidson’s account, meaning and value come from things not working the way they are\u003cbr\u003e supposed to. But rather than fetishizing technical glitch or aesthetic failure, he processes\u003cbr\u003e meaning through a disability hermeneutic. Throughout Distressing Language, the lines between\u003cbr\u003e poetry, sound art, and music are intentionally blurred and violated, while the meaning of sound is\u003cbr\u003e foregrounded as something especially important for those who have limited access to it.\u003c\/p\u003e * Jonathan Sterne, McGill University *","brand":"New York University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48867290874199,"sku":"9781479813841","price":22.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781479813841.jpg?v=1722282626","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/distressing-language-9781479813841","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}