In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Body/Text: Sign Language Poetics and Spatial Form in Literature 163 H-DIRKSEN L. BAUMAN 12 In his Essay on the Origin of Language, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1966) speculates that a society might just as well have developed “by the language of gesture alone.” If this had happened, Rousseau muses, “We would have been able to establish societies little different from those we have. . . . We would have been able to institute laws, to choose leaders, to invent arts, to establish commerce, and to do, in a word, almost as many things as we do with the help of speech” (9). Rousseau’s ruminations lead us to wonder about this gestural society: Although its economic and legal systems may have been “little different from those we have,” what about the arts and literature? It seems safe to assume that literature, at the very least, would be quite distinct from that produced by a society of speakers . For starters, there would be no language and hence, no literature per se, as the terms language and literature stem, respectively, from the Latin lingua (tongue) and littere (letter). Much like the term oral literature, sign literature is an oxymoron at best and an outcast at worst.1 As it turns out, Rousseau’s speculations were to come partially true, as formal deaf education had begun to develop in France by the time he had published his essay, a phenomenon that ultimately led to the growth of a Deaf, signing community which produced literary-like performances without recourse to speech or writing . Despite the existence of these signing communities and their literatures, they have gone largely unnoticed in literary criticism. While literary theory has historically turned a deaf ear to sign language, it is now time to turn a Deaf eye toward literary theory and practice. Like adding dye to a specimen to reveal the traces of previously invisible substances, a Deaf lens brings to light the previously embedded traces of phonocentrism in the very designs and definitions of literature. Not 1. Despite the original meanings of these terms, however, the past forty years of sign language studies have widened the definitions to account for the validation of signed languages as human languages. 164 H-Dirksen L. Bauman surprisingly, these traces appear everywhere, and are especially pronounced in fundamental aspects of literature such as genre, text, audience, and criticism. Consider, for example, how “voice” infuses the genre of poetry with its foregrounding of the relationship between sound and meaning, or how integral phonetic writing is to the literary “text,” or how implicated auditory perception is in the very concept of audience . These are but a few phonocentric traces evident in the critical apparatus we have constructed around the phonocentric category of literature. As it examines the very construction of literature, a Deaf critical lens is bifocal . One focus is the magnification of the phonocentric heritage embedded in literary practice and criticism; the other is more speculative as we look through this theoretical looking glass to imagine what a purely signed literary theory and practice would be. Such speculation is at the very root of theoretical practice. The Greek theoria originally meant a mental viewing, speculation. Deaf theory insists that it, like the literature it engages, is a visual practice; as such, it both critiques phonocentrism and speculates on the possibility of a literary world created outside its reach. Clearly one enduring discussion throughout thousands of years of literary history would have been structured differently: This is the question of the relations of the visual, spatial, and literary arts in general and the notion of “spatial form in literature” in particular. Conventional wisdom has described painting as a “spatial art” and poetry as a “temporal art.” This commonsense alignment has greatly influenced how we have defined the material and experiential aspects of art and literature. The notion of spatial form, then, is no small matter. As W. J. T. Mitchell (1974) writes, “The concept of spatial form has unquestionably been central to modern criticism not only of literature but of the fine arts and of language and culture in general. Indeed, the consistent goal of the natural and human sciences in the twentieth century has been the discovery and/or construction of synchronic structural modes to account for concrete phenomena” (271). Spatial form, then, may be seen as an explanatory device that allows us to perceive whole structures that elude our immediate and local sensory grasp. Yet spatial form can also be thought of as an...

Share