Reading Beckett with Disability Studies

What is it about?

An inevitable hierarchisation occurs when we attempt to read disability studies theory with literature. We bend or deconstruct the fiction, correct it, as it were, in order to tease out the moral and social injustices attending the representation of disability. The underlying assumption is that representation is secondary to its real-life models, recalling the biases against literature that date back to antiquity. Beckett's literature poses a challenge to this view, as it does not adhere to analogy as the basis of representation. Beckett's is an art of non-relation, and as such should not be read as an attempt to offer literary figures or expressions to their living counterparts. Rather than correct our reading of Beckett to accommodate disability studies, the suggestion is that we think how Beckett might contribute a new approach to urgent questions in disability studies today. Beckett's art allows us to see beyond models of overcoming and think disability anew - outside a binary of success and failure.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

We tend to correct literature according to philosophical, social and political conventions attached to the theory of disability studies. The paper shows how we might, instead, use the literary imaginary in order to augment existing theory and its sites of contention - such as the question of models of overcoming and the supercrip.

Perspectives