SENSE AND DISABILTY
ENG BC 3998y, sec. 3
Tuesday 11:00-12:50 pm
Spring Term 2011
http://senseanddisability.wikispaces.columbia.edu
Jennie Kassanoff
Office: Barnard 413
Office phone: 854-5649
Mailbox: Barnard 417
http://kassanoff.wikischolars.columbia.edu
Office hours: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00
and by appointment
Email: jkassano@barnard.edu
TEXTS
The following texts are available for purchase at Book Culture:
L. Frank Baum
Stephen Crane
William Faulkner
Joseph Gibaldi (ed.)
Ernest Hemingway
Henry James
Helen Keller
Booker T. Washington
Eudora Welty
Edith Wharton
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(Barnes and Noble Classics)
Great Short Works of Stephen
Crane (Harper Collins)
The Sound and the Fury
(Knopf)
MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research Papers, 7th ed.
(MLA)
The Sun Also Rises (Simon &
Schuster)
The Spoils of Poynton
The Story of My Life (Dover)
Up From Slavery (Dover)
A Curtain of Green and Other
Stories (Harcourt)
Ethan Frome (Dover)
978-1-59308-221-5
978-0-06-083032-8
978-0-679-73224-2
978-0-87352-975-4
978-0-7432-9733-2
978-0-14-043288-6
978-0-486-29249-6
978-0-486-28738-6
978-0-156-234924
978-0-486-266909
WIKI
This semester, we will use a wiki, a website that we will write and edit as a class community.
Several of the assignments will use the wiki, which will not only allow us to communicate
between class meetings, but also will help us prepare for our seminar discussions. The wiki is
found at http://senseanddisability.wikispaces.columbia.edu/. When you browse to that location,
you will be prompted for a username and password. Enter the username X and the password Y.
The main page of the wiki gives instructions for setting up your own account and participant
page.
MODERATING AND PARTICIPATING IN SEMINAR DISCUSSIONS: PREPARATION AND
FOLLOW-UP
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During the semester, you will be responsible for leading two seminar sessions. On those
dates, your role as co-moderator will begin in the week leading up to class. You and your comoderator(s) will be responsible for editing the class plan page on the wiki. In its bare form, the
class plan page includes the required reading assignment and suggestions for further reading.
You will add questions and issues for consideration, passages you’d like your classmates to
consider from the assigned texts, and passages from the further reading that you’ve found
interesting or provocative. Each class plan must include all three elements, though they may
sometimes be woven together, in the form, “Critic A argues X. On the other hand, what about Y?
Consider these passages.” The material you post should be pointed and specific. Please don't
copy blocks of background material. If you post a quotation from a critical text, please use it to
raise a question or issue. And if you post a biographical or historical fact, suggest how
consideration of that material might open our discussion outward. In the course of the week,
other seminar participants will use the expanding class plan page to guide our reading.
Each seminar member will post at least one comment or question on the class plan page or on
the discussion page. (A discussion page is reached by clicking on the discussion tab above any
page.) As moderators, you may choose to respond to or incorporate these comments into your
class plan. When we arrive in class, you and your co-moderator(s) will direct the discussion.
Afterwards, you’ll update the class plan page to include issues that emerged in the discussion or
interesting responses to your questions. Finally, you’ll send me an e-mail and let me know how
you think it all went: what pleased you, what frustrated you, what questions were more
interesting than you expected, what questions less so.
EXTENDED ESSAY
Each seminar participant will research and write an extended essay (known in other seminars as
the “senior thesis”). Your extended essay will be prepared in several stages.
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First, you will submit a one-paragraph topic proposal, due Monday, February 23. Your
topic need not focus on one of the texts we are reading in class; it must, however,
concern itself with a work of American literature published in the time period we are
studying -- roughly 1890 to 1945.
Second, you will conduct a preliminary literature search, and will prepare an annotated
preliminary bibliography, due on Monday, March 9. Your preliminary bibliography
should contain at least five sources other than those we have been reading in class.
Third, you will write a thesis prospectus presenting a project plan and a more developed
bibliography. You will submit a draft to your Writing Fellow on Monday, March 23, and
the final version to me on Monday, April 6. In the interim, you will meet with your Writing
Fellow for a conference.
You will submit a working draft of your thesis to your Writing Fellow by Monday, April 20,
and then meet with her in conference sometime during the following week.
Finally, you will write a 20- to 25-page extended essay, due by 12:00 noon on Monday,
May 4. Essays must submitted by that time or they will be counted as late. All written
assignments must be turned in on time: a half letter grade will be deducted for every
day that a late assignment is past due. There are no exceptions, so please plan ahead.
All written assignments should be submitted in their best form – creatively written in 12point, double-spaced Times Roman type (including indented quotations), with the pages
numbered and stapled, your work thoroughly proofread and carefully documented with
parenthetical references and a Works Cited list in accordance with the MLA Handbook
for Writers of Research Papers (7th edition). I will be happy to consult with you at any
stage during the brainstorming, outlining, writing, editing and/or rewriting process:
please feel free to sign up for a time slot during my office hours, or to make a separate
appointment. When you submit your essay, please include your Writing Fellow draft and
an 8 X 10 self-addressed manila envelope. Please note that essays submitted without a
manila envelope will receive a grade, but no comments.
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HONOR CODE
As seniors, you are familiar with the Barnard College Honor Code. As senior thesis writers, you
will be participating not only in the Barnard College community, but also in the broader
community of literary scholars. This community, like Barnard College, values intellectual integrity
very highly. Plagiarism (the use of someone else’s words or ideas without attribution) is a
serious violation, and I report all cases of plagiarism to the Dean of Studies without exception. If
you are at all confused about appropriate acknowledgment of sources, please see me for
clarification.
WRITING FELLOWS
In order to help you to produce your best work, this seminar will ask you to work with a Barnard
Writing Fellow. The Writing Fellow will provide a sensitive but rigorous audience for your work.
Your Writing Fellow will read drafts of both your prospectus and your final paper; she will then
meet with you to discuss your work. Please note that although Writing Fellows are not
specialists in the material we will be studying this semester, they have received rigorous training
in the pedagogy and mechanics of expository writing. If you have questions regarding the
content of your paper, please consult directly with me.
CLASS PARTICIPATION
The real action in this senior seminar takes place in the classroom. You are therefore asked to
come to seminar prepared and alert with your reading assignments completed and your
contributions to the wiki posted in a timely way. Because knowing how to articulate your ideas
verbally is a crucial part of the intellectual process, you will be expected, as a member of the
class community, to contribute your own unique perspectives to our discussions, so that other
students can learn from you as well as you from them. Silence is not an option. Class
attendance and punctuality are, of course, mandatory: chronic lateness and/or more than one
absence will adversely effect your class participation grade.
LAPTOPS IN THE CLASSROOM
While laptops can make notetaking easier, they can also pose a barrier (literally and figuratively)
to class discussions. My preference is that you not use laptops in class. If you must, however, I
ask that, in consideration of others, you sit in the back or along the sides of the classroom.
Obviously, surfing the web, checking your Facebook page or im-ing friends are pleasures to
pursue outside of class.
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CONSULTATIONS AND OFFICE HOURS
Although you may sign up for an office-hour time slot or schedule an appointment with me at any
time during the semester (and for whatever reason), I ask you to choose your extended essay
topic in direct consultation with me. To sign up for my office hours, visit
http://jkassanoff.pbwiki.com. Feel free to sign up for any one of the eight 15-minute time slots
available each week on Thursdays, 2-4, or click on the link to “ENG BC 3998y” where you will
find additional appointment slots. To make an appointment with me outside of office hours or
conference times, please e-mail me several convenient times during which we could meet,
including times before 10:30 a.m. I will email you an appointment time.
If you find that you cannot keep a pre-arranged office-hours appointment, please be considerate
of others and cancel as soon as possible.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Thoughtful postings to wiki and frequent, lively, informed seminar participation, 10%
Topic proposal, 5%
Annotated bibliography, 10%
Prospectus (4-6 pp.), 10%
Writing Fellow drafts and conferences, 5%
Moderator activities, 20%
Extended essay (20-25 pp.), 40%
SCHEDULE OF READINGS:
TH 1/22
Introductions
Ralph Waldo Emerson, excerpts from “The American Scholar” (1837)
MO 1/26
DUE: Create your page on the wiki
(http://senseanddisability.wikispaces.columbia.edu/) by making a link
from the participant page. Type a short biography on your page. (See
my page for a model.)
TH 1/29
The Aesthetics of Autism
REQUIRED READING
Stephen Crane, Maggie; A Girl of the Streets (1893)
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1907)
Mark Osteen, “Autism and Representation: A Comprehensive
Introduction,” Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen (New
York: Routledge, 2008) 1-47.
FURTHER READING
Michael Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” Realism, Writing,
Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1987), 91-161.
Susan Schweik, “Disability Politics and American Literary History:
Some Suggestions,” American Literary History 20 (Spring-Summer
2008): 217-237.
Catherine Prendergast, “And Now, a Necessarily Pathetic Response: A
Response to Susan Schweik,” American Literary History 20 (SpringSummer 2008): 238-244.
Ato Quayson, “J.M. Coetzee: Speech, Silence, Autism, and Dialogism,”
Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation
(New York: Columbia UP, 2007).
Polly Morrice, “Autism as Metaphor,” New York Times Book Review
(July 30, 2005): 23.
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TH 2/5
Consuming Disability
REQUIRED READING
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia
UP, 1997), Chapters 1-2.
FURTHER READING
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for
Amusement and Profit (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), chapter 8.
Stuart Culver, “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and
The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows,” Representations 21
(Winter 1988): 97-116.
Vivian Wagner, “Unsettling Oz: Technological Anxieties in the Novels of
L. Frank Baum,” The Lion and the Unicorn 30.1 (2006): 25-53.
TH 2/12
Stigma and Self-Reliance
REQUIRED READING
Booker T. Washington (1901), Up From Slavery
Douglas Baynton, “Slaves, Immigrants, and Suffragists: The Uses of
Disability in Citizenship Debates,” PMLA 120 (Mar. 2005): 562-67.
FURTHER READING
Erving Goffman, selections from Stigma (DSR 131-140)
Lerita M. Coleman, “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified” (DSR 141-152)
Nancy Bentley, “The Strange Career of Love and Slavery:
Chestnutt, Engels, Masoch,” American Literary History 17.3 (2005):
460-485.
Kenrick Ian Grandison, “Negotiated Space: The Black College Campus
as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America,” American Quarterly
51.3 (1999): 529-579.
John Williams-Searle, “Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the
Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900,” The New Disability
History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Laura
Umansky (NY: New York UP, 2001) 157-186. (On reserve.)
Gregory Michael Dorr, “Defective or Disabled? Race, Medicine, and
Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama,” Journal of the
Gilded Age & Progressive Era 5.4 (2006): 359-392.
TH 2/19
Read Ahead/Read Back Day (no class)
Individual conferences in my office (Barnard 413). Please sign up for
your spot on http://kassanoff.wikischolars.columbia.edu.
MO 2/23
One-paragraph topic proposal due.
Post to your wiki page, and tag as “extended essay.” Email a copy to
me via attachment by 4 p.m.
TH 2/26
Sense and Disabilty
REQUIRED READING:
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903)
William James, “Laura Bridgman,” (1904) Collected Essays and
Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), 453-458.
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Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," Illuminations, ed. and intro Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-251.
FURTHER READING
Susan Crutchfield, “‘Play[ing] her part correctly’: Helen Keller as
Vaudevillian Freak,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25 (Summer 2005):
n.p.
Sam Halliday, “Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of
Perception,” Criticism 48 (Spring 2006): 175-201.
Georgina Klege, “Helen Keller and ‘The Empire of the Normal,’”
American Quarterly 52 (June 2000): 322-25.
Kim Nielsen, “Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness,” The New
Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore
and Laura Umansky (NY: New York UP, 2001) 268-90. (On
reserve.)
Jim Swan, “Touching Words: Helen Keller, Plagiarism, Authorship,”
Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1992): 321-64.
TH 3/5
Paralysis and Pain
REQUIRED READING
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
Elaine Scarry, “Pain and Imagining,” The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 161-180.
FURTHER READING
Elizabeth Ammons, “The Myth of Imperiled Whiteness and Ethan
Frome,” New England Quarterly 81 (2008): 5-33. (Visit Butler
Periodicals Reading Room.)
Jennie Kassanoff, “‘A close corporation’: the body and the machine in
The Fruit of the Tree,” Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 59-82.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “What Can Narrative Theory Learn from
Illness Narratives?” Literature and Medicine 25.2 (2006): 241-254.
John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen,
Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 2004), Introduction and Chapter 1. (On reserve.)
MO 3/9
Annotated bibliography due.
Post to your wiki page, tag as “extended essay,” and email a copy via
attachment to me by 4 p.m. In addition, add your entries, with
annotations, to the Bibliography page of the wiki. At the end of each
bibliographic entry and annotation, please include your initials (e.g.:
-JAK).
TH 3/12
Administering Veterans
REQUIRED READING
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Ana Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation, Resistance and
Disabled American Veterans of the First World War,” European
History Review 14 (Dec. 2007): 543-565.
FURTHER READING
Dana Fore, “Life Unworthy of Life?: Masculinity, Disability, and Guilt in
The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway Review 26.2 (2007): 74-88.
Scott Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order’: The Reeducation of Disabled
WWI Veterans in New York City,” Journal of Social History 39
(2005): 161-80.
Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (NY: Routledge, 1991).
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K. Walter Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The
Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World
War I,” The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds.
Paul K. Longmore and Laura Umansky (NY: New York UP, 2001)
236-267. (On reserve.)
Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the
American Eugenics Movement (NY: Oxford UP, 2004). (On
reserve.)
David Serlin, “The Other Arms Race,” (DSR 49-65)
TH 3/19
SPRING BREAK
MO 3/23
Draft of prospectus due to Writing Fellow
Please place your draft on my office door, and sign up for your Writing
Fellow conference by 4 p.m.
WE 3/25 –
MO 3/30
Writing Fellow conferences
TH 3/26
Feeble-mindedness, Sterility and the State
REQUIRED READING
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
United States Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)
FURTHER READING
Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA 120.2 (2005): 568576.
Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the
Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. (On reserve.)
Merritt Moseley, “Faulkner’s Benjy, Hemingway’s Jake,” College
Literature 13 (Fall 1986): 300-304.
Maria Truchan-Tataryn, “Textual Abuse: Faulkner’s Benjy,” Journal of
Medical Humanities 26 (Fall 2005): 159-172.
TH 4/2
Parents and Impairment
REQUIRED READING
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (1931)
Janice Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew: Ideologies of
Parenting and Intellectual Disability in American History,” Mental
Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, eds. Steven Noll and
James W. Trent, Jr. (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 130-164. (On
reserve.)
FURTHER READING
Pearl S. Buck, The Child Who Never Grew (1950). (On reserve.)
Elizabeth Greene, Histories of 79 Feebleminded Girls Under
Supervision in the Community (New York: National Committee for
Mental Hygiene, 1923). (Available in the Butler stacks.)
Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics
from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: U of Cal
P, 2001), Chapter 4. (On reserve.)
Harold Pollack, “Learning to Walk Slow: America’s Partial Policy
Success in the Arena of Intellectual Disability,” The Journal of Policy
History 19.1 (2007): 95-112.
MO 4/6
Prospectus due (4-6 pp.)
8
Post to your wiki page, and tag with “extended essay.” Paper-clip your
Writing Fellow draft to your completed assignment, and place the entire
package on my office door (Barnard 413) by 4 p.m.
TH 4/9
Protectionism and Personhood
REQUIRED READING
Eudora Welty, “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies,” “Petrified Man,” “The
Key,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “A Visit of Charity,” “A Worn Path”
(1936)
Douglas Baynton, “‘A Silent Exile on This Earth’: The Metaphorical
Construction of Deafness in the Nineteenth Century” (DSR 33-48)
FURTHER READING
Laurent Berlant, “Re-writing the Medusa: Welty’s ‘Petrified Man,’”
Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (1989): 59-70.
Robert Y. Drake, Jr., “Comments on Two Eudora Welty Stories,”
Mississippi Quarterly 13 (Summer 1960): 123-131.
Kevin Moberly, “Toward the North Star: Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’
and the Slave Narrative Tradition,” Mississippi Quarterly 59 (Winter
2005/2006): 107-127.
Gail L. Mortimer, “‘The Way to Get There’: Journeys and Destinations
in the Stories of Eudora Welty,” Southern Literary Journal 19.2
(1987): 61-69.
TH 4/16
Queering Prosthesis
REQUIRED READING
Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled
Existence,” (DSR 301-308)
FURTHER READING
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP,
1997), chapter 6. (On reserve.)
Naomi Morgenstern, “'Love is home-sickness': Nostalgia and Lesbian
desire in Sapphira and the Slave Girl,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 29
(Winter 1996):184-205.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, Part 1: “Black Matters.” (On reserve.)
MO 4/20
Working draft due to Writing Fellow
Your draft should be at least 12 pages long and should include an
unannotated bibliography. Please place your draft on my office door by
4 p.m., and sign up for your Writing Fellow conference.
TH 4/23
Optional conferences available. (No class.)
Sign up at http://jkassanoff.pbwiki.com.
TH 4/23 –
WE 4/29
Writing Fellow conferences
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MO 5/4
Extended essay due (20-25 pp.) by 12:00 p.m.
Post your completed essay to your wiki page, and tag with “extended
essay.” Paper-clip your Writing Fellow draft and your self-addressed
manila envelope to the hard copy of your extended essay, and place the
whole package on my office door (Barnard 413) by 12 p.m. Remember
that essays submitted without a self-addressed manila envelope will
receive a grade, but no comments.