Playing Catch-Up: In case you missed it, earlier this month I wrote about the importance of disabled writers in literary criticism, and mentioned that this Substack will be a review-stack for a few rounds. For more on why culturally competent criticism is necessary, and a review of the much-lauded Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, check here.

This weekend I had the opportunity to teach an online class about disability in literature, the ways we normally see it, and how we can do better.

In the class, we focused on common tropes of disability and deafness in literature:

1. Disability as monstrosity, a visual, external representation of a character’s internal evil, a la Captain Hook or the Joker.

2. Disability as child-like and/or inspiration, in which the disabled character exists solely to serve and inspire the nondisabled ones, like Tiny Tim or John Singer

3. Disability as the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about, in which a writer just makes shit up about a disability, a la Stephen King’s Nick Andros, who cannot scream because he is a “deaf-mute”

4. And Disability as missing, in which disabled characters don’t exist at all, or are killed off, like John Singer and Spiros, Nick Andros, the whole Me Before You sitch, etc.