The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity

Language is integral to our

social being. But what is the status of those who stand outside of language?

The mentally disabled, wild children, people with autism and other

neurological disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial

intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at its borders.

In the intricate verbal constructions of modern literature, the

‘disarticulate’-those at the edges of language-have, paradoxically, played

essential, defining roles.

Drawing on the disarticulate figures in

modern fictional works such as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury,

Nightwood, White Noise, and The Echo Maker, among others,

James Berger shows in this intellectually bracing study how these characters

mark sites at which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and

scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the greatest ethical

tension, as society confronts the needs and desires of the least of its

brothers. Berger argues that the disarticulate is that which is unaccountable

in the discourses of modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the

prevailing social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as

disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate figures

reveal modernity’s anxieties in terms of how it constructs its others.