Thread by @JillianWeise

This is an invitation for disabled graduate students and disabled tenure-track professors and disabled full professors and all people in teaching positions, who are disabled, to teach the course

LITERATURE BY DISABLED PEOPLE

The course requires that you teach books by us.

We do not teach books by nondisabled people in LITERATURE BY DISABLED PEOPLE.

We do not recognize nor honor the nondisabled experts. We do not care about their writing.

The course is for our writing.

I'm updating my site so front page shows the syllabus.

It is not "my syllabus." It is our syllabus.

It is a starting point. It will change because you will change it and that is great.

It cannot be plagiarized because I did not write it. I put our codes together.

LITERATURE BY DISABLED PEOPLE
ENGL or LIT or CRW XXXX
Future Semester: You’re the Teacher
Your Email Address Goes Here
Class Days+Times Will Be Accessible to All

COURSE OBJECTIVES
Read & interpret prose & poetry by disabled people
Compose creative & critical responses
Collaborate through workshop
Apprentice with the work of one disabled writer

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Literature by disabled people begins, sustains and innovates nearly all literature. #Homer and #Sappho and #Epictetus were disabled. So let’s start there.

We will move through time – though time is a tryborg fiction (e.g. crip time, sick time, quantum time) – and arrive at Patty Berne’s “Disability Justice” and Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility. Along the way we will ask:

Who is a disabled writer?

Why have disabled writers been hidden from us?

Who benefits from the suppression of literature by disabled people?

How do we reclaim disabled writers from non-disabled imaginaries?

#LitByDisabledPeople

In the second half of the course, apprentice with the work of one disabled writer you have never read before. Read your writer’s fragments, tweets, blogs, live journals, discord posts, notes from the caucus or the protest or the minutes of a meeting where your writer was present

scraps left behind by your writer in an archive you’ll probably have to find, open the cardboard box, open the external hard drive, open the email, g-chat, FB direct message, IG direct message, Snapchat, screenshot saved by someone who got your writers consent

to preserve your writers everything, also interviews, book reviews, Tumblrs, TikTok videos, your writers’ comments on videos or posts by others: anything your disabled writer has written? Whether in a book or not? Read that.

Turn in something. Anything you want. In convo with the disabled writer you selected to read. This is called an apprenticeship.

REQUIRED READING
None of it is required if you don't consent to read it. Your consent comes first. The texts are impaired by having been in books only.

There are many other kinds of writing by disabled people. Not everything is a book. But here are the books. Excerpted & available for free on Canvas. We will not read all of them. That would be impossible. We will probably only read from 4-6 of these books.

We will purposefully slow-read because that goes against the nondisabled way and because I am disabled. Very disabled. If someone asks, “What does your teacher have?” Tell the person: “Audacity and pride. Those are her conditions.”

The list below is in-progress and incomplete. A list of all the books by disabled people would be over 1000 pages of a syllabus.

Sappho, select fragments
Homer, excerpt from The Iliad
Epictetus, excerpt from The Handbook
Milton, sonnet 19
Joachim du Bellay, excerpt Les Regrets

Harriet Tubman, excerpt from Scenes from the Life
Emily Dickinson, #745
Charles Darwin, excerpt from The Red Notebook
Randolph Bourne, “The Handicapped”
H.D. “Notes on Thought & Vision”
Zelda Fitzgerald, “A Millionaire’s Girl”
Dorothea Buck, TBD
Jean Toomer, excerpt Cane

Hazel Hall, excerpt from Walkers
Jorge Borges (& more from Ultraists?)
Josephine Miles, Teaching Poet (needs reprint)
Muriel Rukeyser, excerpt The Life of Poetry
Robert Creeley, “Histoire de Florida”
Hannah Weiner, the clairvoyant poems
Pat Parker, select poems

NOW HERES WHERE I'M ABT TO GET IN TROUBLE WITH MY DISABLED FRIENDS. I'm purposefully not including lots of my friends bc then I would just be pandering to us. This bigger than who I'm friends with

Richard Brautigan, excerpt from Trout Fishing
Laura Hershey, just go to archive in Denver
Khadijah Queen, excerpts from Anodyne
Yomi S. Wrong, transcript of interview at Hastings
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, excerpt Conversations
Shahd Alshammari, excerpt Notes on the Flesh

Tremain & Hall, Biopolitical Philosophy website
Corbett OToole, excerpt from Fading Scars
John Lee Clark, anything
Patty Berne, “Disability Justice”
Alice Wong, Disability Visibility
Tzynya Pinchback, How to Make Pink Confetti
A. A. Vincent, excerpt Person, Perceived Girl

Poet, not yet disclosed as disabled
Fiction writer, not yet disclosed as disabled
Essayist, not yet disclosed as disabled
Novelist, not yet disclosed as disabled
Playwright, not yet disclosed as disabled
Intermedia, not yet disclosed as disabled

Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous

And so thats the REQUIRED READING.