Read more
"This book is about the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics and how physical and intellectual difference challenges generic terms for art and poetry. The book's title 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?" This book 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"--
About the author
Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His most recent books include
Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body and
Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic.
