Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature
Autor Riley McGuireen Hardback – 23 apr 2025
In Dysfluent in Fiction, Riley McGuire unspools a literary history of vocal disability in the nineteenth century, arguing that this underexamined literary trope helps us to understand vocal hierarchies that still structure our present. Adopting the term “dysfluency” to show departure from normative expectations of pace, pitch, and fluency, McGuire reveals how dysfluent speech populates an enormous number of nineteenth-century texts and played a formative role in the lives of some of the period’s most influential writers. Dysfluent in Fiction examines anglophone literature during the long nineteenth century in both England and America by authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Frederick Douglass. Examples of dysfluencies across genres include lisping lovers, a baby-talking fairy, a mute detective, various disabilities in narratives of enslavement, and more. These representations show how disabled speech was both stigmatized and celebrated in ways that clarify our contemporary response to the spectrum of human articulation and that are a vocal corollary to current notions of neurodiversity. Dysfluency’s power, McGuire contends, lies in its denial that a single mode of articulation is possible, let alone desirable.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215869
ISBN-10: 0814215866
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 5 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215866
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 5 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“McGuire deftly combines literary texts, biographical and historical sources, reception theory, and contemporary criticism to illuminate vocal disability not as a minor aspect of secondary characters but as a central facet of nineteenth-century narratives.” —Karen Bourrier, author of Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik
“A standout feature of Dysfluent in Fiction is that it stays true to the project of dysfluency—it refuses to reduce a study of vocal disability to a liberatory project that might overstate dysfluency’s resistance of fluent speech’s hegemonic and sovereign assumptions. An original, well-researched, nuanced treatment of a neglected subject.” —Amy R. Wong, author of Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk
Notă biografică
Riley McGuire is Assistant Professor of English at Worcester State University, where his teaching and research focus on nineteenth-century British literature and its intersections with theories of disability, sexuality, and sound.
Extras
Dysfluency’s meanings far exceed the mere absence of fluency. Across the preceding chapters, vocal disability has nimbly moved from functioning as a marital impediment, to a nostalgic childhood joy, to an occupational asset, to an amusing though exploitative component of stardom, to a fraught analogy for freedom. These examples are indicative of the cultural ubiquity of dysfluent representation throughout the nineteenth century—across authors, mediums, decades, and borders. The purposes of these depictions have proven as diverse as they are plentiful, though they are united in their demonstration of the voice’s power to locate people within or exclude them from significant social structures.
Cultural entanglements with vocal disability persist into the twentieth century. To take one notable instance, dysfluency was commonplace in animated cartoons following the introduction of sound into the medium. Marc Shell has shown how the animation juggernaut Warner Brothers found the mockery of nonstandard English in the form of talking animals to be lucrative. From the exaggerated Mexican accent of the mouse Speedy Gonzales to the French intonations of the skunk Pepé le Pew, from the lisping Daffy Duck to the disordered speech of Tweety Bird, vocal difference was part and parcel of the so-called “Golden Age” of American animation. While the racialized caricature of Speedy was greeted with outrage, comparable collective ire over the representation of dysfluent figures took longer to foment. Indeed, critiques of the “most famous speech-impeded personage” of the mid-century, the stammering Porky Pig, were not publicly voiced until the 1990s—over fifty years after the character’s creation. Porky holds the record as the longest-continuing character from the Looney Tunes franchise, known for his signature farewell: the stammeringly articulated “That’s All, Folks!” Like his textual precursors, Porky’s specific form of stammering is not motivated by mimetic accuracy: it is atypical and exaggerated when compared to actual dysfluent speakers.
Though the product of a notably different context and medium, Porky emerges as an unlikely synthesis of many of the claims of Dysfluent in Fiction. The character’s social circle shows the durability of both the heredity- and contagion-based models of dysfluent origin discussed in chapter 1: his father Phineas’s stutter suggests Porky inherited his articulation, whereas his girlfriend Petunia’s stutter gestures to vocal infection via social proximity. Porky comes to reembody Charles Dodgson’s stammer in the cartoons Porky in Wackyland (1938) and its colorized remake Dough for the Do-Do (1949), the titles evoking Wonderland and Dodgson’s stuttered articulation of his surname and self-caricature as the Dodo bird. Recalling the failed recitation of Dodgson’s Bruno examined in chapter 2, Porky’s inaugural appearance in I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935) shows the young pig struggling through a school reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). The scene evokes the specific pressures of recitation for dysfluent students, while Porky’s stuttered articulation of the patriotic poem conjures the problematic place of the dysfluent citizen in the nation-state—a point similarly embodied by stuttering wood engraver George Pearson in the introduction.
Furthermore, the history of Porky’s voice actors echoes the contrasting valuations of E. A. Sothern’s performed dysfluency and Henry Irving’s habitual stammer from chapter 4. Porky was initially voiced by Joe Dougherty, who also had a small (and silent) part in The Jazz Singer (1927), a key film in the transition from silent film to talkies. Dougherty stuttered in his daily life and performed his dysfluency to bring Porky to life: he played the porcine role from 1935 until 1937 when he was fired in part “because it was expensive to have an actor who stuttered when he didn’t want to.” Dougherty was replaced by Mel Blanc, one of the most influential voice actors of all time, who would provide Porky’s stammer for over fifty years. Though Blanc voiced “a parliament of hundreds of speech-impeded animals,” including Tweety and Daffy, he had no vocal disabilities himself. Recalling the vocal evaluations of Victorian stage culture, lived dysfluency is to be lamented and purged, feigned dysfluency lauded and perpetuated as entertainment alleviates the social marginality of vocal difference.
Cultural entanglements with vocal disability persist into the twentieth century. To take one notable instance, dysfluency was commonplace in animated cartoons following the introduction of sound into the medium. Marc Shell has shown how the animation juggernaut Warner Brothers found the mockery of nonstandard English in the form of talking animals to be lucrative. From the exaggerated Mexican accent of the mouse Speedy Gonzales to the French intonations of the skunk Pepé le Pew, from the lisping Daffy Duck to the disordered speech of Tweety Bird, vocal difference was part and parcel of the so-called “Golden Age” of American animation. While the racialized caricature of Speedy was greeted with outrage, comparable collective ire over the representation of dysfluent figures took longer to foment. Indeed, critiques of the “most famous speech-impeded personage” of the mid-century, the stammering Porky Pig, were not publicly voiced until the 1990s—over fifty years after the character’s creation. Porky holds the record as the longest-continuing character from the Looney Tunes franchise, known for his signature farewell: the stammeringly articulated “That’s All, Folks!” Like his textual precursors, Porky’s specific form of stammering is not motivated by mimetic accuracy: it is atypical and exaggerated when compared to actual dysfluent speakers.
Though the product of a notably different context and medium, Porky emerges as an unlikely synthesis of many of the claims of Dysfluent in Fiction. The character’s social circle shows the durability of both the heredity- and contagion-based models of dysfluent origin discussed in chapter 1: his father Phineas’s stutter suggests Porky inherited his articulation, whereas his girlfriend Petunia’s stutter gestures to vocal infection via social proximity. Porky comes to reembody Charles Dodgson’s stammer in the cartoons Porky in Wackyland (1938) and its colorized remake Dough for the Do-Do (1949), the titles evoking Wonderland and Dodgson’s stuttered articulation of his surname and self-caricature as the Dodo bird. Recalling the failed recitation of Dodgson’s Bruno examined in chapter 2, Porky’s inaugural appearance in I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935) shows the young pig struggling through a school reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). The scene evokes the specific pressures of recitation for dysfluent students, while Porky’s stuttered articulation of the patriotic poem conjures the problematic place of the dysfluent citizen in the nation-state—a point similarly embodied by stuttering wood engraver George Pearson in the introduction.
Furthermore, the history of Porky’s voice actors echoes the contrasting valuations of E. A. Sothern’s performed dysfluency and Henry Irving’s habitual stammer from chapter 4. Porky was initially voiced by Joe Dougherty, who also had a small (and silent) part in The Jazz Singer (1927), a key film in the transition from silent film to talkies. Dougherty stuttered in his daily life and performed his dysfluency to bring Porky to life: he played the porcine role from 1935 until 1937 when he was fired in part “because it was expensive to have an actor who stuttered when he didn’t want to.” Dougherty was replaced by Mel Blanc, one of the most influential voice actors of all time, who would provide Porky’s stammer for over fifty years. Though Blanc voiced “a parliament of hundreds of speech-impeded animals,” including Tweety and Daffy, he had no vocal disabilities himself. Recalling the vocal evaluations of Victorian stage culture, lived dysfluency is to be lamented and purged, feigned dysfluency lauded and perpetuated as entertainment alleviates the social marginality of vocal difference.
Cuprins
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction The Stammering Century Chapter 1 Lisping Lovers: Plotting Dysfluent Union in Thackeray and Brontë Chapter 2 Refusing to Grow Up and Speak Right: Prosthetic Authorship and Dysfluent Choice in Dodgson Chapter 3 “The Dumb Detec(k)tive”: Braddon’s Professionalization of the Mute Role Chapter 4 Our American Cousin, Our Dysfluent Nation: Celebrity Speech Disorder on the Transatlantic Stage Chapter 5 “I Have Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue”: Enslavement, Dysfluency, and the Vocal Metaphors of Freedom Coda “Th-th-th-that’s All, Folks!” Works Cited Index
Descriere
Lays out a transatlantic literary history of vocal disability, arguing that this underexamined nineteenth-century literary trope helps us to understand contemporary vocal hierarchies.