Dysfluencies

Reviews / Votes

Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature is an authoritative and important book that creates a model for interdisciplinary studies that will enlarge the horizon of scholarly work for years to come. Its study of modern literatures - British, American, French, Japanese, Australian - creates a significant rethinking of literary history in relation to neurological and clinical understandings of representations of behavior, personality, and motivation in literary texts. It does so by bringing together the diverse disciplines of medicine, neurology, psychology, and poetics in creating a rich sense of the power of language and discourse as it is inflected by intellectual culture. Its understanding of speech disorder as not only a deficit but also as a "superabundance" of linguistic function has much to teach medicine and neurology, just as it demonstrates throughout how literary studies and simply the experience of reading can be enriched in the light of the systematic knowledge and practical work of neuroscience and medicine. For readers in all these disciplines, Dysfluencies offers a mode of comprehension that will make their understanding and work more inclusive, more humane, and more fulfilling. -- Ronald Schleifer, George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English, Adjunct Professor in Medicine, University of Oklahoma, USA Dysfluencies is a critical genealogy of modern literature's struggle to understand the faculty of language, not what we say or how, but the very fact that we can say it. Reading for the moments when that faculty deserts us, Eagle offers a wide-ranging but tightly focused literary history from a surprising angle, but also undertakes a thoroughly original reflection on literatures attempt to grapple with its most basic material. -- C. D. Blanton, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA