- Title: Lecture - 'Words Stare Like a Glass Eye: From Literary to Visual to Disability Studies and Back Again'
- Host Department:
Institute for the Humanities
- Date: 02/09/2004 - 02/09/2004
- Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
- Location: Osterman Common Room, 0520 Rackham Building, 915 E. Washington, Ann Arbor
- Contact Information: Nicola Kiver
734 936 3518
- Description: Tobin Siebers, Comparative Literature
- Detailed Information: Featuring our Fellows Series
More on Tobin Siebers
It is a common place to think that we can "read" things other than texts. Buildings, bodies, automobiles, and political events are thought to be readable even though no texts are involved. This paper engages in a thought experiment to reverse this trend by picturing texts according to theories of visual culture. It uses disability studies as the pivot point between literary and visual studies to establish ideas of complex embodiment necessary to visualize texts as images. Theorists and authors include Erich Auerbach, Roland Barthes, Stephen Crane, Junot Díaz, Thomas Eakins, Michael Fried, and Naomi Schor.
Tobin Siebers (Comparative Literature / English) has been selected for fellowships by the Michigan Society of Fellows, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In 1996-97, he held the Steelcase Research Professorship in the Institute for the Humanities. In 1999 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for "My Withered Limb," an account of growing up with polio. His principal contributions to literary and cultural criticism have been in ethics. Other areas include: disability studies; aesthetics and politics of identity; literary criticism of the cold-war era; psychoanalysis; literature and anthropology; and creative nonfiction.
