From Oedipus (whose name, literally, means “swollen foot”) to Shakespeare’s Richard III to John Steinbeck’s Lennie, literature is filled with representations of people with disabilities, a tradition that continues in modern comics, film, and television.
Typically, texts have relied on both mental and physical disability to make a point, often treating disability and disabled characters in symbolic terms and often in ways that are superficial, demeaning, and even politically dangerous. Reading from a variety of literary and pop culture texts, this course explores major models of disability representation, looking at the ways in which disability has been seen as villainous, angelic, unclean, innocent, shameful, weak, “special,” wondrous, and inspirational. The collective work of the class is to figure through the ways in which disability has been forced to “mean” something, to test the ways in which literature and popular culture might allow disability to be itself, and to discover how a diversity of fictions invite us to challenge the boundaries of the human.
This site is home to the final projects of students at Lehman College who have spent a semester in Julia Miele Rodas’ Fictions of Disability course, reading disability literature and theory, watching disability film, and thinking and talking about this field of representation.
About the professor
Julia Miele Rodas is Professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. She earned her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.
A disability studies scholar and Victorianist, Julia is co-editor of a collection on disability in Jane Eyre, The Madwoman and the Blindman (The Ohio State University Press, 2012) and co-editor of the Literary Disability Studies book series for Palgrave Macmillan. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, and other venues.
Her forthcoming monograph—Autistic Disturbances—theorizes the role of autistic rhetoric and aesthetic in literature.
Julia teaches writing, literature, and disability studies at Bronx Community College as well as guest courses at Lehman College, CUNY’s School for Professional Studies, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Disability, Culture & Society and founding co-Chair of the CUNY Disability Scholars.
Twitter @JuliaMieleRodas and @LiteraryDisblty
