| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the fictional representation of cross-cultural encounters that revolve around sign-language and gesture. Focusing on long and short-form fiction written in English, it draws on the fields of Disability and Deaf Studies as it tracks the representation of these modes of communication across different historical periods, from the rise of the novel to the present day. By deploying on Mary Louise Pratt’s critical conceptualisation of the ‘contact zone,’ as ‘a space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict,’ the thesis opens up the way in which literary depictions of signed and gestural encounters can be seen to naturalize normative languages – and the exploitative, violent relations between different peoples as well as human and non-human animals that these languages encode. But while in this sense the thesis links literature with linguistic hegemony, so too it is concerned with the way in which these fictionalized contact zones can be understood as radical spaces, disrupting normative communicative modes and power relations, and realising new ways of being and acting in the world.
The first chapter addresses the usage of gestural contact language within imperial encounters staged by adventure fiction. Beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), but also turning to consider R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the chapter engages with some of the earliest representations of gesture and sign language in enduringly popular English fiction. The second chapter looks at non-normative forms of communication as presented in two examples of enfant-sauvage literature, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894-5) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1914) Both narratives are significant for the way they complicate the distinction between human and non-humans, with their depictions of gesture, sign, and verbal language disrupting ideas of human exceptionalism. The third chapter focuses on the depiction of sign-language and gesture in science fiction texts of the 1960s and 1970s. By looking at Frank Herbert’s ‘A Day To Remember’ (1961), Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s Silence is Deadly (1977), and John Varley’s ‘The Persistence of Vision’ (1978), the chapter explores the way in which sign-language is utilised by a number of authors to depict alien alterity, as well as how these non-normative forms of communication can subvert and undermine the idea that language is a uniquely human phenomenon and that spoken language is a precursor to civilized development. The fourth chapter looks at the short stories of Louise Stern, published in Chattering: Stories (2018). As a Deaf author, Stern’s use of sign-language in her narratives actively subverts widely held audist preconceptions surrounding identity, culture, and language. Through critically engaging with these fictional encounters between hearing and Deaf individuals, this chapter examines the idea of a deaf ontology as radical and disruptive to phonocentric normativity. Taken together, these chapters create a thesis which actively challenges not only many audist preconceptions that surrounding the d/Deaf identity but also critically interrogates sign language and gesture as a meaningful communicative form. Through this, this thesis aims to critically engage with non-normative forms of communication as part of a linguistic diversity, whilst also creating a methodology for analysing and interrogating gestural and signatory encounters within fictional contact zones with the same narrative and ontological worth that is de facto afforded to spoken dialogue. | en_GB |
