In his Introduction to this collection, editor Chris Eagle cites ‘the risk of adding yet another new kid to the block of identity politics’ (4) in the proposal for an interdisciplinary field of Dysfluency Studies. It is a risk worth taking. At a time when representations of speech disorders have been gaining popular and critical acclaim in Western cultures, Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability is the first collection to bring analyses of dysfluent speech together with the intention of examining its cultural capital in the literary imagination. The result is a text of both genealogy forming and potential gathering ideas, bringing together a range of methodologies and content under a flexible heading of literature. It is interesting because of its resulting looseness, and because of the sense it imbibes of pushing outwards to what could be next.
While the collection is expansive in scope, a core concern that emerges in different ways is how Dysfluency Studies can and will position itself in relation to its more established cousin of Disability Studies. Joshua St. Pierre’s opening chapter highlights most explicitly the kinds of debates that need to be had around these issues by examining the liminal position of stuttering in relation to disability. He maintains that as the apparently absolutist nature of disability is not extended to speech disorders, stuttering easily slides into being considered as a moral failing, something that could be resolved with enough practice and self-discipline. His alternative is to classify stuttering as a dialogic process, where ‘“broken” speech’ (14) is constructed by the context of both speaker and listener. Jeffery Johnson’s chapter also explores the cultural capital invested in the moralising of the stutterer, in line with work done in Disability Studies. Located in representations in popular US comic books and television, he details a consistent use of stuttering as shorthand for characters’ shortcomings, weaknesses and even inherent evil. Taken together, these chapters show the emergent nature of the Dysfluency field: how Disability Studies methodologies will be vital, particularly in the early stages of development, but that Dysfluency has the potential to push these beyond their current parameters.
Dysfluency is put to many purposes in this collection, with some chapters developing it as a methodology to investigate the material experiences and constructions of our understanding of both spoken and written language. Laura Davis examines the influence of Samuel Johnson, and his own experience of an episode of aphasia in his later life, on contemporary Western notions of normalised speech. Like St. Pierre, Davis gives an indication of what Dysfluency might mean beyond a focus on clinical speech pathologies, drawing on the representations of non-standard, and non-dominant, accents in Johnson’s disparaging conclusions on the oral traditions of the Scottish Highlanders. For Johnson, speech and orality can only indicate disorder: writing becomes the only reliable format of communication. Ronald Schleifer’s chapter posits a relationship between poetry, or the poetic fascinations with and urges to use language, and Tourette’s syndrome. In a careful argument that avoids romanticism, he creates a connection that allows an understanding of Tourette’s syndrome to explore the materiality of language in the poetic form, and vice versa. Such focuses on material aspects and experiences of speech and language expose, but importantly can also re-work, the hierarchies that surround disordered linguistics.
At the centre of the collection are a series of re-readings of texts from the Western canon that attempt to draw out the literary heritages of Dysfluency. The chapters by Chris Eagle and by Laura Salisbury and Chris Code investigate modernist texts where the critical focus on linguistic experimentation and play has often obscured material treatments of speech pathologies. Eagle addresses Giles Deleuze’s three creative potentials of stammering in the disordered lingua-scape of Finnegan’s Wake, arguing that Joyce explores the potentials not only of transcribing and describing stuttering, but of creative stuttering. In reading a text where such detailed attention must be paid to the linguistic minutia, a stuttering of the reader emerges. Salisbury and Code examine the psychosomatic nature of linguistic emissions across the body of work by Samuel Beckett, and how language seems positioned between control and compulsion. Delving even further into the literary genealogies of Dysfluency, Valéria Souza offers a re-reading of The Lusiads, the sixteenth-century national epic poem of Portugal. Male voices in the poem are not poised, controlled or exclusively fluent, providing a challenge to both masculinities and the epic framework of poetics, and again engaging with creative potentials of stuttering.
The remaining chapters attest to the expansive designs of the collection, and the variety available to the future of Dysfluency. Herbert Mark’s chapter utilises the Kantian sublime to suggest that the stammering of Biblical prophets is a due response to the excessive signifier of the call from God to speak on His behalf. Gene Punka traces the importance of language to the comprehension of culturally embodied experience through the representations of aphasia in Jean-Claude van Itallie’s play The Traveller and other contemporary US plays. While I would not disagree with the importance of language, his focus on the quest metaphor of The Traveller channels his arguments solely towards the protagonist’s reacquisition of his language, and it would have been interesting to see further consideration of the materiality of this reacquisition.
It will be intriguing to see what work emerges from the cues offered by this collection, and which of the array of potentials discussed here are taken up by other scholars. As a text, Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability does not establish the boundaries of a potential field as much as its vast prospective borderlands. Each chapter could be used as much to develop the work of existing fields as to push for a coalescing of Dysfluency Studies, and the proposals they make could be productively read in a variety of ways. I hope, however, that the need for further work is taken up under the terms of Dysfluency, as I feel that interdisciplinary partnerships rather than sub-divisions will offer more interesting and exciting ideas for the future.
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
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© 2015, Emma Sophie Pickering
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1045351