Write of passage: Understanding disability and illness narratives through the bodies of Nancy Mairs, May Sarton, and Muriel Rukeyser.

摘要

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.