Class description: Traditionally, "the cripple" has been portrayed as a sub- or superhuman figure but never quite human, as little more than a symbol, a flat, one-dimensional character that could never represent the complexities of human life.   Literary classics (i.e., Oedipus Rex, Richard III, Moby Dick)often have delineated the blind and the motorically impaired as either quasi-supernatural or evil entities (blind seers, twisted kings, mad and obsessed amputees).   John Steinbeck's 1937 Of Mice and Mendepicts the cognitively impaired Lennie Small as a "violence-prone" beast "just asking to be destroyed" (Norden 3).   Before the 1970s, Hollywood most often engaged in either hagiography (The Miracle Worker [1962]) or demonization (Dr. Strangelove [1964])when representing the disabled.

In the last few decades, cinematographers have made efforts to explore more accurately the complex, flawed, and all-too-human lives of the disabled.   Such efforts raise a number of questions.   For example, what artistic "use" do cinematographers now make of disability? How is disability represented?   What meanings does disability take on?   What do disabled characters come to symbolize?   How does disability intersect with race, class, and gender?   Whose point of view comes across in these films--that of the able-bodied or of "the other"?   Have contemporary directors made the disabled objects of pathos?   Have they created another round of feel-good, inspirational images of impaired individuals overcoming the inadequacies of their bodies and minds?   Or have they used disability as a vehicle to challenge conventional notions of beauty, the body, and normality?

By the end of this course, we will have developed a complex and nuanced set of responses to these questions.   This line of interrogation will provide a springboard for generating focused, sustained, intelligent prose.