| "Crippled Bodies and Crumpled Selves: The Construction and Use of Narrative in Memoirs of Disabled Americans" presents a new resource for the study of disabled life-writing and offers an expanded methodology for studying American autobiography, not only by using narrative theory to analyze memoirs, but also by questioning the cultural presumptions that underlie the normative/ideal body. This dissertation examines how elements of narrative theory, including time, distance, and voice, affect and alter the representation of each author's subjectivity in a diverse collection of recent memoirs written within the past thirty years. In addition to narrative theory, my research connects autobiography theory with disability studies which furthers the examination of such issues as embodiment in the text, elision of negative portrayals of disability, and the intersection between gender and disability. These disabled memoirists counteract limiting and limited cultural identities by presenting different and complicated selves in and through the text. As well, I investigate the ways in which these memoirists variously employ the discourse of sentimentalism in order to expand and/or contract the distance between the narrator and narratee.;In chapter one, I examine Christopher Reeve's Still Me and Martha Mason's Breath, and the way in which the narrative technique of prolepsis works to keep the inspirational character of the Super-Crip from collapsing. In chapter two, I explore the construction of narrative voice in Terry Healey's At Face Value and Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, and I examine how these narrators refocus attention on their words versus their faces. In chapter three, I study the representation of sexuality and disability in various texts by John Callahan, Lucy Grealy, and Nancy Mairs; I investigate how focalization can impact the way in which the narrator is viewed by the narratee. Finally, in chapter four I examine the use of frequency as a method for articulating chronic pain in David Rozelle's Back in Action and Lenor Madruga's One Step at a Time. This project offers a new perspective on the race, class and gender issues that have tended to dominate studies of identity politics in autobiography studies by including and examining disabled persons' issues, concerns, and subjectivities. |
