Bloomsbury Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature

Dysfluencies is the first comprehensive study of how speech disorders are portrayed in modern literature. Tracing the roots of this interaction between literary practice and speech pathology back to the rise of aphasiology in the 1860s, Dysfluencies examines portrayals of disordered speech by writers like Zola, Proust, Joyce, Melville, and Mishima, as well as contemporary writers like Philip Roth, Gail Jones, and Jonathan Lethem. Dysfluencies thus speaks directly to the growing interest at present, both in popular culture and the Humanities, regarding the status of the Self in relation to speech pathology. The need for this type of study is clear considering the number of prominent writers whose works foreground disorders of speech: Melville, Zola, Kesey, Mishima, Roth, et al. Moreover, thinkers like Freud, Bergson, and Jakobson were similarly concerned with the implications of language breakdown. This volume shows this concern began with the rise of neurology and aphasiology, which challenged spiritual conceptions of language and replaced them with a view of language as a material process rooted in the brain. Dysfluencies traces the history of this interaction between literary practice and speech pathology, arguing that works of literature have responded differently to the issue of language breakdown as the dominant views on the issue have shifted from neurological (circa 1860s to 1920s) to psychological (circa 1920s to 1980s), and back to neurological during the so-called "decade of the Brain" (the 1990s). Review Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature is an authoritative and important book that creates a model for interdisciplinary studies that will enlarge the horizon of scholarly work for years to come. Its study of modern literatures British, American, French, Japanese, Australian creates a significant rethinking of literary history in relation to neurological and clinical understandings of representations of behavior, personality, and motivation in literary texts. It does so by bringing together the diverse disciplines of medicine, neurology, psychology, and poetics in creating a rich sense of the power of language and discourse as it is inflected by intellectual culture. Its understanding of speech disorder as not only a deficit but also as a superabundance of linguistic function has much to teach medicine and neurology, just as it demonstrates throughout how literary studies and simply the experience of reading can be enriched in the light of the systematic knowledge and practical work of neuroscience and medicine. For readers in all these disciplines, Dysfluencies offers a mode of comprehension that will make their understanding and work more inclusive, more humane, and more fulfilling. --Ronald Schleifer, George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English, Adjunct Professor in Medicine, University of Oklahoma, USADysfluencies is a critical genealogy of modern literature's struggle to understand the faculty of language, not what we say or how, but the very fact that we can say it. Reading for the moments when that faculty deserts us, Eagle offers a wide-ranging but tightly focused literary history from a surprising angle, but also undertakes a thoroughly original reflection on literatures attempt to grapple with its most basic material. --C. D. Blanton, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA About the Author Chris Eagle (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is Research Lecturer in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.