Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error

This talk is based on Michael Davidson’s recent book, Distressing Language, which, he avers, is full of mistakes—errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. It is also a book about the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics and how physical and intellectual difference challenge generic terms for art and poetry.  

The book’s title combines the idea of a language that disturbs or causes anxiety with language that is ripped, worn, or damaged. This interplay brings together the social environment in which language is exchanged with the materiality of words that frustrate easy comprehension. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of “sounding good?” 

In this talk, Professor Davidson will reflect upon the ways Distressing Language grew out of the author’s experience of hearing loss, in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence, not as a deficit but as a gain. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter in considering how verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge. 

This hybrid event is hosted by Health Humanities at Humanities Institute.

Speaker Bio:

Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His work has focused on modern and contemporary American poetry, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies and deaf studies. His books on poetics include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His work in disability studies includes Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford U Press, 2019) and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error (New York U Press, 2022). 

He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002). 

• Michael Davidson is giving another talk "How to Dance Sitting Down: Aging, Innovation and the Graying of Disability" on September 13th at 5 pm in the Great Hall, Irish Cultural Center.