Points of Contact

by Crutchfield, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780472067114
• ISBN10: 0472067117
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-17
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

Points of Contactbrings together contributions by leading writers, artists, scholars, and critics to provide a remarkably broad and consistently engaging look at the intersection of disability and the arts. The contributions include essays and memoirs by a wide range of disabled and nondisabled writers, including Bell Gale Chevigny, Sandra Gilbert, Joseph Grigely, Georgina Kleege, Victoria Ann Lewis, Carol Poore, Tobin Siebers, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson among others; poetry by Brooke Horvath, Joan Seliger Sidney, William Stafford, and others; fiction by Stephen Dixon, Michael Downs, Georgina Kleege, Dallas Wiebe, and others. The collection covers a broad range of subjects and concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and the arts, including fetal alcohol syndrome, education, and identity; representations of disability in the visual arts and the complicated position of the disabled spectator; the impact of cancer on the patient and the caregiver; the similarities between beauty pageants and freak shows; Alzheimer's disease; prosthetic devices; the mechanized disabled body; disability and performance; and profiles of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, Christopher Reeve, Franklin Roosevelt, and sado-masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan. Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culturewas originally published as a special double issue of the well regarded literary magazine, theMichigan Quarterly Review. Now available in a single, convenient paperback volume, its broad range of perspectives on disability and its entertaining and engaging selections will appeal to general readers, scholars, and students alike. Susan Crutchfield is lecturer in English, University of Michigan. Marcy Epstein teaches literature at The Roeper School and women's studies at Henry Ford Community College.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(21)
Susan Crutchfield
Marcy Epstein
My Withered Limb	21	(10)
Tobin Siebers
Postcards to Sophie Calle	31	(28)
Joseph Grigely
Sayings of the Blind	59	(1)
William Stafford
The Blindness of a Rose	60	(1)
Burton Raffel
The Cicerone at Antietam	61	(2)
J. Quinn Brisben
``But Roosevelt Could Walk'': Envisioning Disability in Germany and the United States	63	(29)
Carol Poore
Prosthesis Maker	92	(1)
Willa Schneberg
The Dramaturgy of Disability	93	(16)
Victoria Ann Lewis
The Motor Cart	109	(6)
Stephen Dixon
E-Mail to the Dead	115	(4)
Sandra M. Gilbert
To the Curious People Who Ask, ``What Do Your Tremors Feel Like?''	119	(1)
Eli Clare
About a Boy	120	(2)
Reginald Shepherd
The Thief	122	(5)
Dallas Wiebe
At Walden's in Augusta Mall, We Meet the Reader Come Down from the Mountains	127	(2)
Mark DeFoe
Reading The Gingerbread Man with my Daughter	129	(4)
Brooke Horvath
Living with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Fetal Alcohol Effect (FAS/FAE)	133	(14)
Ann Ruggles Gere
Cynthia Margaret Gere
Letters to Helen	147	(22)
Georgina Kleege
Staring at Yellow and Green (Life and Art and PMS)	169	(10)
Sarah Ruden
Ode to Bob Flanagan	179	(2)
Karen Alkalay-Gut
The Beauty and the Freak	181	(16)
Rosemarie Garland Thomson
Talking about Talking Back: Afterthoughts on the Making of the Disability Documentary Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back	197	(21)
David T. Mitchell
Sharon L. Snyder
Wheelchair, Or, Marko Takes Life Lying Down	218	(2)
Susan E. Fernbach
Self-Portrait with 1911 NY Yankees Cap	220	(2)
Floyd Skloot
Laps	222	(2)
Joan Seliger Sidney
Waiting for the Operation	224	(14)
Robyn Sarah
Rehearsal	238	(18)
Michael Downs
Relatively Disabled	256	(7)
F. D. Reeve
Eclipse: A Theater Workshop on Disability, or, Reflections on Ahab's Tribe	263	(30)
Bell Gale Chevigny
Contributors	293