C LIT 496 A: Special Studies In Comparative Literature

What is “disability”?  What is “health”?  What is “normal”?  What is a “body”?  This course will examine how these questions have historically been answered in Russia and its cultural productions involving disability, focusing on 19^th -21^st -century literature and art.  Among our topics:  the grotesque, the “holy fool” and  the “cult of suffering.”  We conclude with a consideration of the disabled in late/post-Soviet Russia – a (still-ongoing) historical moment in which discourses of disability have reached unprecedented levels – and ponder the future of disability rights in Russia.