I haven’t posted anything here and that’s my fault (I chronically seem to have no concept of time), so I’ll pretend to be productive and post what I have so far of my Master’s thesis list (and I probably missed several articles). I’m tentatively going to be writing in the realm of disability (blindness, primarily), early moderns, and John Milton (mostly regarding Samson Agonistes).
- Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought, Moshe Barasch.
- Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in early modern Popular Performance and Print, Simone Chess (in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, Hobgood & Wood).
- Vanities of the Eye, Stuart Clark.
- Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, Lennard Davis.
- Constructing Normalcy,Lennard Davis (in Disability studies reader).
- Disability Studies Reader, Lennard Davis (editor).
- Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Lennard Davis.
- Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, Joshua Eyler (editor).
- The Vanitie of the Eye, George Hakewill.
- Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama, Allison P. Hobgood.
- Ethical Staring, Disabling the English Renaissance, Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (in Recovering Disability).
- Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (editors).
- Samson Agonistes, John Milton.
- Paradise Lost, John Milton.
- Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
- Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers.
- Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England, David Houston Wood.
I’ve read several on the list already and will probably post thoughts later. As a general side note, disability studies has been really compelling for me as someone who both identifies as chronically ill and is in the process of diagnosis for a genetic condition (there are very strong indications of either Ehlers Danlos Syndrome or a Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder). I can’t seem to look at the standard medical rhetoric used for this condition and medical rhetoric in general quite the same way now. But more on that later.
Next post: definitely will be about potential interests of where I want to go with it, because there are a lot of things jumping out at me even this early on. I could not be more thrilled with what I’m doing.