Disability Studies has become an important new domain for literary and theoretical inquiry. Numerous articles and critical studies of physical disabilities, their history, construction, and representation in art, literature and culture, have appeared in recent years. The MLA's recent volume, _Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities_, confirms that Disability Studies has arrived as a humanities discipline.
But one is hard-pressed to find, amid this growing body of work, much significant scholarship on the culture and discourses of cognitive disability. Whether this represents a decision on the part of literary and cultural scholars to abandon the field to the clinical sciences, or whether, as some suspect, cognitive impairments alone retain much of the stigma once attached to all disabilities, remains open to question.
To begin to fill this gap, we seek papers addressing how cognitive disabilities constrain or enable textual production and consumption. We welcome proposals about literary and cultural treatments of traumatic brain injury, dementia, autism, retardation, dyslexia; about the relationships between cognitive impairment and written communication; about the formation and employment of alternative textual and communicative modes.
The panel, to be convened at the 2004 MLA convention in Philadelphia, will be sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange, the longest-standing theory organization in literary studies. The SCE is an allied organization of the MLA, and so this session will definitely run. In keeping with SCE practice, panelists will eschew the reading of papers; instead, each panelist will submit his/her paper in advance to be posted on the SCE website, and then give a 10-12 minute summary, which will be followed by a response from the chair, and then discussion with the audience.
Please send 250-word abstracts (no papers please) by 15 March to Mark Osteen (mosteen@loyola.edu).
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From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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