Distressing Language

Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His most recent books include Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body and Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic.

Drawing on his own experience of increasing deafness, Davidson provides an engrossing look into the ways that slips or unusual forms of language can unexpectedly lead to new meanings and beauty. Distressing Language expertly weaves together modern poetry and fiction, popular culture, sign language art, theory, politics, and history, and is often as funny as it is profound. * Christopher Krentz, author of Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature * A highly original account of language, meaning, and sound, all framed through hearing loss. In Davidson's account, meaning and value come from things not working the way they are supposed to. But rather than fetishizing technical glitch or aesthetic failure, he processes meaning through a disability hermeneutic. Throughout Distressing Language, the lines between poetry, sound art, and music are intentionally blurred and violated, while the meaning of sound is foregrounded as something especially important for those who have limited access to it. * Jonathan Sterne, McGill University *