‘Brilliant, bright, boiling words’: literary disability, language and the writing body in the work of Christopher Nolan

Abstract

This article uses theory on disability, embodiment and language to explore the production, context and presentation of two pieces of life-writing by Christopher Nolan. It examines Nolan’s unusual use of language and form in his presentations of an experience of disability, and considers its literary and political significance. Consideration is given to the role played within language, and by extension society, by the disabled writing body, as a point of resistance to dominant discourse, and as a point of origin both for language that subverts dominant, disabling language and for ‘new’ language that might replace it.

Keywords:

• Christopher Nolan
• literary
• life-writing
• disability
• language
• embodiment

Notes

1. Amy Vidali (2010, 33–34) also calls for more critical attention within disability studies to the creation and proliferation of metaphor, noting the field’s focus on popular theories of metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that are based on a supposedly universal able-bodied experience. Like Dolmage, she calls for an understanding and reinterpretation of metaphor that includes disabled bodies and experiences (Vidali 2010, 33).

2. Victoria Brignell (2007) has argued that ‘language which incorporates the experience of disabled people … can have just as much impact as able-bodied language’. As this article suggests, it might even be seen that such language can have more impact, by actually redefining and expanding the collective vocabulary of experience