Encountering Physical Difference: Models of Experience and Dialogue
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Keywords
hermeneutics, communication, experience
Abstract
This paper utilizes Hans-Georg Gadamer’s classic philosophical study of the art of interpretation, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode) (1960), to examine literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s 1996 collection of essays on bioethics and disability, Tyranny of the Normal. Because Fiedler’s primary analytical model centers around the experience of engaging an abjected Other and subsequently revising one’s self-conception based on this experience, it is useful to examine Fiedler’s arguments with respect to Gadamer’s theories of the hermeneutic circle, the historicity of experience, and the dialectical nature of understanding. Viewing these writings through a Gadamerian lens allows us to devise critical readings of the crucial social moment when the nondisabled “normal” individual and the person with a disability meet. Conversely, Gadamer’s text allows us to develop important criticisms of Fiedler’s work centered on the ahistorical and non-dialectical character of Fiedler’s interpretation of nondisabled individuals’ encounters with disability. Juxtaposing these two thinkers allows us to develop philosophical, psychological, and ethical warrants for disability rights activists’ assertions that the lives, medical treatments, media representations, and political destinies of people with disabilities must not be determined by the non-disabled alone.
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William Etter, Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Languages, Irvine Valley College
William Etter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College. He has published articles on normalization in Edgar Allan Poe’s short fiction and the Civil War memoir of the disabled soldier Alfred Bellard as well as book reviews of works in the field of Disability Studies. He recently completed a book manuscript entitled, “The Good Body”: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, and is currently researching the application of Disability Studies to works by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, and Mark Twain.