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Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of "Loss" explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volume draw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Whether focusing on ancient texts by Zhuangzi or Ovid, renaissance drama, folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, novels or silent film, the chapters in this volume highlight the dialectics of "loss" and "gain" in narratives of amputation to encourage critical dialogue and forge an integrated, embodied understanding of experiences of impairment in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory and politics are considered as interrelated and interacting aspects of disability and ability.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Amputation and the Semiotics of "Loss".- Part I: The Politics of Amputation.- 2. "Lame Doings." Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker's Holiday and A Larum for London.- 3. Complicating the Semiotics of Loss. Gender, Power and Amputation Narratives.- 4. Stalin's Samovars: Disabled Veterans in (Post-)Soviet Literature.- Part II. Amputations's Intersections.- 5. "She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps": Amputation and Embodiment in "The Girl Without Hands".- 6. Defective Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment: Benito Pérez Galdós's and Luis Buñuel's Tristana.- 7. "Even at This Late Juncture": Amputation, Old Age, and Paul Rayment's Prosthetic Family in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man.- Part III: Grief and Prosthetic Relations.- 8. The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the Vengeful Amputee.- 9. "The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole": Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard's Die Billigesser and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.- 10. "But the Damage ... Lasted": Phantom Pain and Mourning in Moritz's Anton Reiser.- Part IV: Philosophy, Language, Disability.- 11. Zhuangzi, Amputees, and Virtue (de).- 12. Speech-Amputation-Writing: Philomela's Notalogy.- 13. (In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Maurice Blanchot.
About the author
Erik Grayson is Associate Professor of English at Northampton Community College, USA. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at Wartburg College, USA, and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther College, USA. He has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Don DeLillo, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.
Maren Scheurer is Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is the author of
Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (2019) and co-editor, with Susan Bainbrigge, of
Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice (2020). With Aimee Pozorski, she serves as executive co-editor of
Philip Roth Studies.
