South of Deafness

Although the US South is often described as having a culture of the voice, South of Deafness: Deafness and Modern Fiction of the US South draws on deafness studies to imagine an alternate South composed of those who do not fit into its oral and aural boundaries. This book explores deafness in modern Southern fiction, which has both shaped and been shaped by the way our dominant culture "hears" deaf people. Too often the critical tendency in reading fictional portrayals of deafness has been to label it as some form of loss. The result is that the deaf person commonly gets viewed as a trope for alienation, inaccessibility, and incompleteness. Informed by a linguistic and cultural approach to deafness, South of Deafness seeks to reclaim the values associated with deafness. Not only does South of Deafness examine how deafness has been marked, problematized, magnified, and often expelled from texts, but it explores how deafness has been refigured not only in the work of Ellen Glasgow and William Faulkner but also in more recent short stories. Gary M. Ciuba devotes individual chapters to in-depth analyses of deafness in the fiction of Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. A concluding chapter examines how three deaf writers from the twentieth-century South—Howard Terry, Donald Harington, and Douglas Bullard—have expanded our awareness of deafness in their fiction.