Disability and contemporary literature

This chapter discusses the disability and contemporary literature we group together some contemporary novelistic approaches to disability as an outline of alternative traditions taking shape wherein the representation of disability explicitly mutates into alternative capacities of living. The list takes on the case of a catalog of productive potentials consistent with early efforts by disability studies in the humanities to reclaim disability as something other than pathology and biological deviance. The novel’s plot ultimately turns upon this very revelation as Jimmy marshals the monosyllables of speech left behind by stroke into “crucial bits of information – passwords, memory locations, patch names – that until then had been the secret domain of the Operations Manager” of the insurance company. The antinormative novel of embodiment privileges disability as a failure of realizing expectations of normalcy, a source of innovation that runs consciously counter to sociality’s insistence on the all-encompassing power of stigmatizing cultural inscriptions.