Deafening Modernism

Deafening Modernism tells the story of modernism from the perspective of Deaf critical insight. Working to develop a critical Deaf theory independent of identity-based discourse, Rebecca Sanchez excavates the intersections between Deaf and modernist studies. She traces the ways that Deaf culture, history, linguistics, and literature provide a vital and largely untapped resource for understanding the history of American language politics and the impact that history has had on modernist aesthetic production.Discussing Deaf and disability studies in these unexpected contexts highlights the contributions the field can make to broader discussions of the intersections between images, bodies, and text. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including literary analysis and history, linguistics, ethics, and queer, cultural, and film studies, Sanchez sheds new light on texts by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Charlie Chaplin, and many others. By approaching modernism through the perspective of Deaf and disability studies, Deafening Modernism reconceptualizes deafness as a critical modality enabling us to freshly engage topics we thought we knew.

An extraordinary book.Superbly written, critically nuanced, and refreshingly new,Deafening Modernismwill set the standard for future disability and Deaf studies scholarship. There is truly nothing else like it., Exciting and original, Rebecca Sanchez remakes our understanding twentieth-century American literature through the frame of American Sign Language. Offering fresh and brilliant insights,Deafening Modernismwill make a significant contribution to our understanding of literary modernism, while modeling new methodological directions for disability studies scholarship., Sanchez uses ASL, Deaf culture, history, linguistics, and disabilities studies to develop a critical Deaf theory that is independent of the more familiar identity theories.

Rebecca Sanchez is Professor of English and director of the disability studies program at Fordham University. She is the author of Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature and (with Mara Mills) co-editor of the republication of Pauline Leader’s And No Birds Sing.