While writing my undergraduate thesis senior spring, I applied and was admitted to Trinity College Dublin (TCD)’s year-long Master’s program in comparative literature. In my mind, it was the perfect way to continue raising questions about disability representation in world literature that had fascinated me throughout my time at Davidson.
So I departed in August 2019 for a new city, a new country, with only the certainty of academia’s structures awaiting me upon arrival.
Four of the six modules that serve as course material were core survey-type modules, common to everyone’s curriculum, while the other two were electives. The core modules were co-taught by several professors across the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies, providing breadth to our foundation as we were reading texts from a large portion of the world (though in no way comprehensive of global literatures in just one year!). My electives contrasted greatly from each other: the first, brand new, entitled Multilingualism, Translation, and Identity in Literature, where we followed themes of liminality, exile/refuge, and the limits of writing. I took as a point of departure our reading of Antonin Artaud to write about Louis Wolfson and the construction of “crip spaces” in his text Le Schizo et les langues. The second, a consistent favorite among the M.Phil students in the School: Postmodernist Literature in Central and Eastern Europe, where we examined the rise of postmodernism in the nations of the former Soviet Union when it came into contact with the postmodern movement after 1990.
I focused my dissertation research focused my dissertation research on literary blindness in the late 20th century, contemporaneous with the Disability Rights Movement and the formulation of the “spatial turn” of postmodern thought that shifted the focus from modernist notions of transcending time to figuring the construction of spaces, in an effort to elaborate on the notion of “crip space” I had rudimentarily developed in my elective module in the fall. I eventually decided to focus on literary blindness and crip spaces in literature published between 1990-200, finding too many texts in the late 20th century to make it a viable topic for a dissertation of 20,000 words (roughly 60 pages).
