Description
Book SynopsisLanguage is integral to our
social being. But what is the status of those who stand outside of language?
The mentally disabled, wild children, people with autism and other
neurological disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial
intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at its borders.
In the intricate verbal constructions of modern literature, the
disarticulate'those at the edges of languagehave, paradoxically, played
essential, defining roles.
Drawing on the disarticulate figures in
modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury,
Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others,
James Berger shows in this intellectually bracing study how these characters
mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and
scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the greatest ethical
tension, as society confronts the needs
Trade Review
[T]he book is a valuable contribution to disability studies both for its speculations and specific readings. It is a very thoughtful and thought-filled work, nuanced and wide-ranging, which should have an effect on the field. * Critical Inquiry *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Disarticulate and Dysarticulate 1. The Bearing Across of Language: Care, Catachresis, and Political Failure 2. Linguistic Impairment and the Default of Modernism: Totality and Otherness: Dys-/Disarticulate Modernity 3. Post-Modern Wild Children, Falling Towers, and the Counter-Linguistic Turn 4. Dys-/Disarticulation and Disability 5. Alterity Is Relative: Impairment, Narrative, and Care in an Age of Neuroscience Epilogue: "Language in Dissolution" and "A World without Words" Notes Works Cited Index About the Author
