Synopses & Reviews
"
Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."
The Minnesota Review
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read."
American Journal of Occupational Therapy
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship."
H-Net Reviews
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."
Novel
"It is crucial, if at times uncomfortable, reading for medical professionals and scholars in the medical humanities alike. . . . Daring to mix the literary and the medical, the symbolic and the instrumental, the interpretive and the interventionist, Davis demonstrates what disability can teach us about the life that awaits any human baby."
Literature and Medicine
"This superlative book is highly recommended for undergraduates, scholars, and researchers in the fields of disability studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethics, and cultural studies."Choice
"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."
Stanley Fish, in Chicago Tribune
"A collection of essays written over several years for different audiences, it contains fascinating traces of Davis's intellectual journey from novel theorist and Foucauldian to disability studeis scholar and memoirist."American Literature
With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.
Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics. Throughout, he maintains that disability is the prime category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body.
Bending Over Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Review
"Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start." - The Minnesota Review
Review
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read." - American Journal of Occupational Therapy
Review
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship." - H-Net Reviews
Review
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues." - Novel
Review
"Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences."
"Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start."
"[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read."
"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship."
"Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues."
Synopsis
With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.
Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics. Throughout, he maintains that disability is the prime category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body.
Bending Over Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Synopsis
Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics.
Synopsis
This unique volume brings together contributions from experts who are able to introduce both the neophyte and the scholar to important faucets of Freud's life and work. The gross misconceptions and distortions of Freud and his ideas which have prevailed in many circles are here dispelled by scholars. Originally delivered at a symposium sponsored by the Freud literary heritage Foundation in cooperation with The Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the contributions to Understanding Freud provide us with a clear look at perhaps the most important mind of this century.
About the Author
Lennard J. Davis is head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is also Professor of Disability and Human Development. His books include
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body and
The Disability Studies Reader.
Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of several books, including Whats Liberal about the Liberal Arts, The Employment of English, and Life As We Know It, which was a New York Times notable book and NPR book of the year. He is general editor of NYU Presss Cultural Front series, has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers, and writes a popular blog, American Airspace, at michaelberube.com.