Bending Over Backwards

Lennard J. Davis is head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is also Professor of Disability and Human Development. His books include Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body and The Disability Studies Reader.Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. In 2012, he served as the President of the Modern Language Association. He is the author of several books, including Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (NYU Press, 1997), The Left at War (NYU Press, 2009), What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and " Bias" in Higher Education (2006), and Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996).

• 1. THE END OF IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE BEGINNING OF DISMODERNISM 2. CRIPS STRIKE BACK 3. DR. JOHNSON, AMELIA, AND THE DISCOURSE OF DISABILITY 4. CRIMINAL STATEMENTS 5. WHO PUT THE THE IN THE NOVEL? 6. THE RULE OF NORMALCY 7. BENDING OVER BACKWARDS 8. GO TO THE MARGINS OF THE CLASS 9. A VOYAGE OUT (OR IS IT BACK?)

"Davis's work offers creative and challenging examples that may be useful to our discipline and particularly to Disability historians. Bending Over Backwards remains an important and useful work for historians as a template for examining the myriad ways disability and Deafness infiltrate vital aspects of our identity, including laws, cultural icons, literature, and citizenship." (H-Net Reviews) "Taken all together, the chapters offer an important, theoretically rich introduction to disability issues." (Novel) "[Its] uniqueness of thought is this collection's strength as it makes for an interesting and proactive read." (American Journal of Occupational Therapy) "Lennard Davis is history in the making; for he is one of the foremost proponents of "disability studies," the newest theoretical kid on the block, noteworthy in part because it brings together scholars from the humanities and the medical sciences." - Stanley Fish (Chicago Tribune) "Bending Over Backwards is a welcome dismemberment of all that was unknowingly artificial from the start." (The Minnesota Review)