Towards a critical stylistics of disability

Abstract

This article sets out the initial terrain for a critical stylistics of disability exposing the linguistic structures that encode often harmful ideologies surrounding disabled people. Disabled people are represented in literature and the media in general as ‘other’, and as curiosities to be described and explained. They are represented stereotypically as pitiable, evil, burdensome, as ‘Super Cripples’ or super humans, or as self-pitying. Such depictions can be internalised by and harmful to disabled people. Analysis will need to acknowledge that disabled people are frequently foregrounded as socially deviant in representations. Areas for analysis will include the author status as disabled or non-disabled, narrative mode, and the use of disability as metaphor. However, major areas for study will be description in noun phrases, transitivity analysis and the language of appraisal and evaluation. These can be scrutinised to expose the manner in which ideologies and stereotypes of disability are encoded.

The space between words: on the description of Parkinson’s disease in Jonathan Franzen’s 'The Corrections'

“…We see the world from Alfred's point of view spatially and temporally. Simpson [23] We do not propose to engage in a detailed analysis of transitivity, of which the actual passive voice is only one element, and thus the range of categories (or processes) into which verbs and their clauses can be divided in relation to comparative agency Ð the relative ability to perform or do a given activity [21,25]. Nevertheless, AlfredÕs watching can be perceived as being relatively inactive, and the boyÕs possible blundering would be an unintentional action.…”

“…The focus on physical characteristics in descriptions of disability is common [31] and is akin to the fragmentation found in description of the female body [21,25]. In the case of disability, it may fulfil a desire to interrogate and describe the disabled body [21]. Of course, it can also be used to draw attention to specific ÔdifferencesÕ in bodily behaviour.…”

“…It remains for us to state that texts describe and construct disability through language. Hermeston21 (cf. Burke14) has pointed out the preoccupation with language in disability studies and the importance of a stylistics of disability to understand in detail the description and construction of disability that one often finds, for instance, in novels.…”

Karl Marx and the language sciences – critical encounters: introduction to the special issue

“…These movements have, therefore, developed their own theorisations and generated their own diverse linguistic literature and traditions, including such contemporary trends as Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw et al eds, 1995), raciolinguistics (Samy Alim, Rickford, and Ball, eds, 2016), Black Linguistics (Makoni et al, 2003), Feminist linguistics and feminist discourse analysis (Baxter, 2003;Cameron, 1992;Cameron, ed,, 1998;Mills, 2008), Queer theory (Cameron and Kulick, 2003) and Transgender Theory (Elliott, 2012). Alongside and in connection with such movements is the emerging field of Disability Studies (and 'disability stylistics', Hermeston, 2017). At the same time these intellectual and activist movements have raised in dramatic fashion the central question of the relationship between 'sectional' struggles (and their theorisation) on the one hand and the struggle for socialism (and its theorisation in Marxism) on the other, with different positionsmore or less aligned with Marxism and Marxism-Feminism (Mojab, 2010;Carpenter and Mojab, 2011;Carpenter and Mojab, Eds, 2011) being advanced and contested.…”

Disability and Discourse Analysis

“…Burke 2008:i), there is a need to go beyond major preoccupations with labels and context that I often detect in scholarship, and to use close linguistic analysis to understand why language has the power it does to encode ideologies of disability. Indeed, I have begun to outline methodologies for exactly this type of analysis (Hermeston 2017).…”