"Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies"

I will be reading the paper in the English department's staff seminar. In lieu of an abstract - here are the first paragraphs:

This paper proposes to untangle the problem of the and linking disability and Beckett studies, to borrow Shoshana Felman’s formulation – ‘the apparently neutral connective word, the misleadingly innocent, colorless, meaningless copulative conjunction’ (1982, 5). It does not promise to succeed.

The emergence of theories of disability in the last decades has rendered figurative interpretation suspect; neglect of literal and material truth has been hailed unethical, the exercising of an ableist bias that utilizes physical impairment as a rhetorical device. Rubin Rabinovitz’s 1985 claim that ‘it is unimportant whether [Beckett’s] fictional entities conform to their material counterparts’ and that what is at issue ‘is how physical objects can be used in portrayals of the world of thought and feeling’ (1985, 317-18) raises concerns amongst disability studies scholars. A case in point, Ato Quayson notes that ‘what is quite odd in studies of Beckett to date is the degree to which physical disability is assimilated to a variety of philosophical categories in such ways as to obliterate the specificity of the body and to render it a marker of something else’ (2012, 56). David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis anticipates Quayson’s find. The book claims that literature uses disability as an ‘opportunistic metaphorical device’ (2000, 47). Such practice generates a paradox: while ‘stories rely upon the potency of disability as a symbolic figure, they rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions’ (2000, 48). Quayson, Snyder and Mitchell agree that the injustice is a product of a slippage from lived-experience to its manifold substitutions. Quayson attributes the oversight to Beckett readers; Snyder and Mitchell suggest the agent of abuse is the writer. This significant distinction notwithstanding, their criticism meets in metaphor, in the substitution of a figure for a referent. The metaphorization of disability is faulted twice. First – it obliterates the material truth of the figure, second – such substitution cements a host of prejudicial significations.[i]