Cover via AmazonIt's week 4 of the semester, and the prompt for this week says to discuss the books we've found so far (since the school library is pretty small, we'll probably have to do interlibrary loans, so we have to start looking right away). As I mentioned before, Dr. Toffee gave me some titles and authors to look for, so I'll start with them.
Davis, Lennard, ed. The Disability Studies Reader. NY: Routledge, 1997. There's a newer edition of this, but this is the one our library has, so I checked it out. It's a collection of articles, and a bunch of them look good for my project. Toffee says that the basics for analysis are in most of the articles.
Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. NY: NYUP, 1998. I read the first chapter in this one (it's a short book), and it looks like I'm going to be using it a lot -- it's just what I need. She talks about how disabled people have been treated through history and now, too.
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 1996. I had to do an interlibrary loan on this, so I haven't seen it yet, but the title sounds like it is relevant. After all, there isn't a much more extraordinary body than the Thing, right? She also has a book on freak shows, which looks pretty interesting.
There's more, but I'll save that for next time.
Image via WikipediaI'm not sure that it is. So far, I've been looking over the books, and the articles are starting to pile up. My biggest problem is that I keep reading the books after I've already found what I need for my project. I'm learning a lot about "the life experiences of people with disabilities" and the obstacles they face, so that's good, but I know I'm burning up time like crazy. I'm starting to wonder if this is an unconscious strategy to put off the real work I need to do before I can start writing, so I'm making a pact with myself: start on the articles, or work on the proposal, or else . . . I can't think of a workable punishment. 
