Duncan Campbell and the Discourses of Deafness

Autor:	Christopher Krentz
Rok vydání:	2005
Předmět:	Biological condition Literature and Literary Theory Aesthetics media_common.quotation_subject Social attitudes Rhetoric Sociology Product (category theory) Linguistics Disability studies Deaf education media_common
Zdroj:	Prose Studies. 27:39-52
ISSN:	1743-9426 0144-0357
DOI:	10.1080/01440350500068775
Popis:	In early-eighteenth-century London, a man named Duncan Campbell claimed to be deaf and to have magical fortune-telling powers, attracting a great deal of attention. This essay examines contemporary prose about Campbell to see what it reveals about social attitudes toward deafness and to explore the relationship between deafness and writing. To us today, Campbell’s deafness is entirely a product of discourse, worked out in language. His actual biological condition is impossible to recover, showing the frequent difficulty of discerning the essential aspects of disability in historical accounts. The writing about Campbell often reveals and combats popular assumptions about deafness, including that congenitally deaf people are evil, monstrous, incapable of reason, and cannot be educated. Whether Campbell was in fact deaf or not, he reveals a great deal about constructions of deafness in his time and helped to pave the way for the rise of widespread deaf education in Europe.
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_________::1da4561a057e505e52107f4e80d9d7b9 https://doi.org/10.1080/01440350500068775 Zobrazit plný text záznamu