Writing after aphasia: Toward an embodied theory of literacy.

摘要

This dissertation uses qualitative, empirical methods to update theories of literacy to account for the experiences of people with aphasia, or language disability caused by stroke or other brain injury. Aphasia reveals how bodily change affects literacy, nuancing how rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies understand the body's ever-present role in reading and writing. Specifically, this study contributes a much-needed disability perspective, exposing how the material, bodily, and social aspects of literacy intertwine and often conflict for readers and writers.;Drawing on disability theory and the experiences of people with aphasia, I argue for an embodied theory of literacy, one that foregrounds 1) the often invisible role of the body and 2) expands our view of literacy as a process in which individuals must negotiate the needs of their bodies with the materials of reading and writing, all against a backdrop of social values delimiting what it means to be or not be literate.;To develop this theory, I conducted 17 in-depth literacy history interviews and participant observation in a semester-long multimodal memoir composing group for 10 people with aphasia. Throughout my analyses, I track how individuals with aphasia read and write before and after aphasia, what challenges they encounter, what strategies they develop, how they reconcile with changes to their literate practices and identities, and what their experiences have to tell us about literacy more broadly.;Building an embodied theory of literacy, each chapter focuses on a different facet of how bodily change affects literate practice and identity---and how individuals negotiate that change. Chapter 1 links disability and literacy studies. Chapter 2 elaborates upon the study's design: 1) focusing on direct observation and life-history interviewing, and 2) foregrounding accessibility in data collection and analysis. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between bodies and materials, developing a theory of "literate misfitting." Chapter 4 shows the enduring pressure of social values on bodies, and Chapter 5 features how people with aphasia in a multimodal composing group rework social norms around literacy to support the needs of their bodies. I close by reviewing primary findings and contributions for literacy theory and teaching.