| This dissertation focuses on three established authors who have become ill or disabled and use the tool of their trade, writing, to create a stronger sense of embodied selves. Through performative and playful writing, they reestablish an empowered sense of self lost when their phenomenological bodies or lived-bodies have failed them. This dissertation examines performative, phenomenological, feminist, and disability and illness theories, as proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Susan Wendell, Drew Leder, Thomas Couser, and others (Chapter 1), to navigate a normally difficult theoretical terrain of literary and cultural theories and apply these to the works of Nancy Mairs (Chapter 2), May Sarton (Chapter 3), Muriel Rukeyser (Chapter 4)--American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mairs, Sarton, and Rukeyser create, in a sense, more reader-friendly and roomier spaces for voices less likely or less able to speak, not only because of their own disability and illness, but also because they want readers: readers who may have had relatively healthy lives and may not necessarily understand the importance that disability and illness play in all of our lives. Illness and disability studies and/or theories represent a relatively new direction for theory, but they inform and elucidate postmodern literature as well as enhance cultural and critical praxes. |
