Amputation in Literature and Film

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xx

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2. Introduction: Amputation and the Semiotics of “Loss”

   • Maren Scheurer, Erik Grayson

   Pages 1-17

3. The Politics of Amputation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. “Lame Doings”: Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London

      • Rachel Ellen Clark

      Pages 21-41

   3. Complicating the Semiotics of Loss: Gender, Power, and Amputation Narratives

      • Lena Wånggren

      Pages 43-59

   4. Stalin’s Samovars: Disabled Veterans in (Post-)Soviet Literature

      • Oxane Leingang

      Pages 61-83

4. Back Matter

   Pages 85-87

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5. Amputation’s Intersections

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 89-89

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   2. “She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps”: Amputation and Embodiment in “The Girl Without Hands”

      • Miranda Corcoran

      Pages 91-112

   3. Defective Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment: Benito Pérez Galdós’s and Luis Buñuel’s Tristana

      • Andrea Gremels

      Pages 113-135

   4. “Even at This Late Juncture”: Amputation, Old Age, and Paul Rayment’s Prosthetic Family in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

      • Erik Grayson

      Pages 137-153

6. Back Matter

   Pages 155-158

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7. Grief and Prosthetic Relations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 159-159

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   2. The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the Vengeful Amputee

      • Susan Kerns

      Pages 161-183

   3. “The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole”: Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard’s Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America

      • Maren Scheurer

      Pages 185-210

   4. “But the Damage … Lasted”: Phantom Pain and Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser

      • Juliane Prade-Weiss

      Pages 211-231

8. Back Matter

   Pages 233-235

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9. Philosophy, Language, Disability

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 237-237

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   2. Zhuangzi, Amputees, and Virtue (de)

      • Danesh Singh

      Pages 239-255

   3. Speech—Amputation—Writing: Philomela’s Notalogy

      • Thomas Emmrich

      Pages 257-288

Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volume draw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Whether focusing on ancient texts by Zhuangzi or Ovid, renaissance drama, folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, novels or silent film, the chapters in this volume highlight the dialectics of “loss” and “gain” in narratives of amputation to encourage critical dialogue and forge an integrated, embodied understanding of experiences of impairment in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory and politics are considered as interrelated and interacting aspects of disability and ability.

• prosthetics
• amputation
• linguistics of amputation
• politics of amputation
• sexuality and amputation
• losing a limb
• medical humanities
• Literature, Science and Medicine Studies
• Disability Studies
• Literature and Disability Studies

“This collection accomplishes the difficult work of situating the meanings of amputation in their historical contexts, within a gendered and sexual economy organized around shifting power relations. In this way, the book brings a sophisticated analysis rooted in disability studies to the examination of amputation as a signifier and as a material reality.”
—Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, CUNY, USA

• Department of English, Northampton Community College, Tannersville, USA

  Erik Grayson

• Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

  Maren Scheurer

Erik Grayson is Associate Professor of English at Northampton Community College, USA. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at Wartburg College, USA, and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther College, USA. He has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Don DeLillo, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.

Maren Scheurer is Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (2019) and co-editor, with Susan Bainbrigge, of Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice (2020). With Aimee Pozorski, she serves as executive co-editor of Philip Roth Studies.

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