The Child's Stuttering Mouth and the Ruination of Language in Jordan Scott's blert and Shelley Jackson's Riddance

Abstract

In recent years, the interdisciplinary field that Chris Eagle has called “Dysfluency Studies” (“Introduction” 4) has questioned cultural expressions of speech disorders that rely on stuttering or stammering as a metaphor for other mental, aesthetic, political, and affective problems.1 Literary, cultural, and critical expressions of stutters and stammers (some literal, others metaphorical) are notoriously difficult to contextualize because they pop up everywhere in our writing. We desperately want to make the world and its language systems stutter for various aesthetic and political reasons. Echoing the foundational work of disability scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder on the concepts of narrative prosthesis, Eagle writes that “without exception in modern literature, speech pathologies are ‘diagnosed’ metaphorically as the symptom of some character flaw such as excessive nervousness or weakness, or treated as a symbol for the general tendency of language toward communicative breakdown, ambiguity, polysemy, misunderstanding, etc.” (Dysfluencies 11–12). Eagle’s extensive study of the “neurolinguistic turn” in modern fiction by authors such as Herman Melville, Emile Zola, James Joyce, Robert Graves, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Gail Jones, Jonathan Lethem, and David Mitchell, among others, fills a gap in The Child’s Stuttering Mouth and the Ruination of Language in Jordan Scott’s blert and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance