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Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error

Online ISBN:
9781479813858
Print ISBN:
9781479813827
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error

Michael Davidson
Michael Davidson
University of California
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Published online:
19 January 2023
Published in print:
19 April 2022
Online ISBN:
9781479813858
Print ISBN:
9781479813827
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Distressing Language is full of mistakes—errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. It is also a book about the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics and how physical and intellectual difference challenges generic terms for art and poetry. As the title suggests, the book combines language that disturbs or causes anxiety with language that is ripped, worn, or damaged. This interplay brings together the social environment in which language is exchanged with the materiality of words that frustrate easy comprehension. 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. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter in considering how verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge.

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