1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910480216103321

Autore

Berger James

Titolo

The Disarticulate : Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity / / James Berger

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2014]

©2014

ISBN

0-8147-0833-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (312 p.)

Collana

Cultural Front ; ; 8

Disciplina

616.855

Soggetti

Anthropological linguistics

Articulation disorders

Civilization, Modern - 21st century

Language and languages - Study and teaching

Language disorders

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Disarticulate and disarticulate -- 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

Sommario/riassunto

Language 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 language—have, paradoxically, played essential, defining



roles. Drawing on the disarticulate figures in modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Night wood, 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 and desires of “the least of its brothers.” Berger argues that the disarticulate is that which is unaccountable in the discourses of modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the prevailing social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate figures reveal modernity’s anxieties in terms of how it constructs its others.