Disabling Characters

Patricia A. Dunn received her doctorate from the University at Albany. She is an associate professor in Stony Brook University’s English Teacher Education Program. She is the author of Learning Re-Abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies, as well as a number of articles on disability. In 2013, she received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

«Patricia A. Dunn’s fourth book breaks fresh but long overdue ground. She offers a smart, unique, and accessible critical engagement with YA literature that features characters with disabilities. She explores the agency, awakening, respect, and identity-forging potential in representations of disabled characters in this literature. She also, importantly, conducts a constructive critique of ‘normal’ and the status quo in «supercrip» storytelling. Thus, she fruitfully works disability representation in YA lit in both ways (good and bad) without the reduction of simple binaries. Dunn’s work here is ultimately a character, climate, and cultural analysis that demonstrates how a critical reading of disability in YA literature might break down and redefine barriers that disabled people (and young adults especially) might have in gaining full citizenship and community-cultural participation.» (Brenda Jo Brueggemann, University of Louisville; Author of Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places (2009) and Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (1999))«In Disabling Characters, Patricia A. Dunn brings together the fields of disability studies and young adult literature, in ways that push both in new and exciting directions. Her thoughtful analysis of YA texts, through a disability studies-influenced lens, will push scholars, teachers, and students to think about YA, indeed all cultural artifacts, in challenging ways. While reading, I found myself looking at books I’ve read many times in the past, in ways I had never before considered. The questions Dunn poses about her selected titles will make readers think not only about those particular books, but about how we treat all texts in our classrooms. How we, as a society, view people with disabilities/disabled people, and how society itself plays a role in disabling individuals, are issues that need to be examined. Dunn provides a clear, comprehensive way of doing just that. This is a welcome and vital addition to the academic conversation, but an even more powerful addition to pedagogy. Theory and practice are woven together in expert fashion, with an eye toward how teachers and students can talk about texts and characters. I have long admired Dunn’s work, and this is the book that only she could have written. I see Disabling Characters opening up thoughtful, fruitful discussions about texts in classrooms at all levels. Dunn begins by positing that ‘the status quo is not acceptable,’ and then proceeds to change it in significant ways. I know I will be a better teacher for having read this work, and both YA and disability studies are richer for her contribution.» (Mark Letcher, Purdue University Calumet; Editor of the young adult literature column «Off the Shelves» in English Journal (2008–2013))

• Contents: Agency, Rebellion, and Challenging the Status Quo: Accidents of Nature and The Acorn People – Respect, Etiquette, and the Drama of Rude Behavior – Awakening Stories: The Scarlet Ibis and The Cay – Carving Out an Identity: Peeling the Onion, Stoner and Spaz, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – «Normal» Talents, Rudolph Stories, and «Supercrips».