Literature Becomes Hearing

Christopher Krentz's Writing Deafness represents something of a milestone in literary history: With its publication, literature and literary criticism have become more fully hearing. Granted, this is an odd assertion whose meaning does not immediately conform to common sense. Yet it is precisely this common sense, the sense of hearing, that is defamiliarized and reawakened by this study of deaf authors, deaf characters, and a deaf presence in nineteenth-century American literary texts.

Perhaps the notion of "becoming hearing" may best be explained through personal example. I myself "became hearing" when, at the age of twenty-one, I began working as a dormitory counselor at a residential school for deaf students. Prior to that time, I was simply a person so accustomed to hearing and speaking that I could not recognize they were the warp and woof of my everyday consciousness. It was only through the sudden contrast with a majority of deaf people at this residential school that my status as a hearing person became evident. The same may true of literature.

Unconsciously, hearing writers and their texts enact ways of being in the world that reflect the default mode of being hearing. However, with the aid of Krentz's study of the "hearing line" in nineteenth-century American literature—a deliberate echo of W. E. B. DuBois' famous "color line"—we may now identify aspects of American literary history that have previously been hidden in the shadows of other, more visible identities. "By considering the complexities surrounding the literary emergence of deaf people in nineteenth-century America more carefully," Krentz writes, "we will find that the meanings of deafness and its conceptual opposite, 'hearingness,' were at least as unstable as other identity categories, and something that Americans repeatedly felt constrained to test, probe, and attempt to demarcate" (2). Once Krentz brings the hearing line to the fore, it seems rather obvious that hearing and deafness would be an important part of texts since they are omnipresent in everyday life. As Krentz writes, "The hearing line resides behind every speech act, every moment of silence, every gesture, and every form of human communication, whether physical deafness is present or not. . . . The discourse over the hearing line pertains to all people and is ultimately as pervasive as discourses about race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability" (5). In this light, what could seem to be a marginal, arcane topic is of significance to the deepest aspects of our being.

Writing Deafness may be read as a companion piece to Christopher Krentz's previous publication, A Mighty Change: Deaf American Writing 1816–1864 (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000), which provides readers with their first opportunity to become acquainted with nineteenth-century Deaf American authors. Now, with his second book, Krentz offers readers a theoretical lens through which they can interpret these and other writings. His introduction forges this lens by drawing parallels with African American writers' and scholars' expressions of the double consciousness that results from constructing an identity within a racist society. While relying on twentieth-century African American thought, Krentz is careful to offer important caveats that identities are more complicated than the binary constructions implicit in du Bois' "color line" and "double consciousness." Indeed, throughout the text we see that nineteenth-century authors, both deaf and hearing, draw important, complex, and sometimes shifting identities along the hearing line.

The first full chapter follows the emergence of the American Deaf community from 1816 to 1835 through the views of Deaf authors. While Deaf studies curricula frequently recite the important role of the cofounder of American Deaf education, Laurent Clerc, Krentz provides ample justification for his reputation. The rhetorical skills Clerc employed are noteworthy, especially as he anticipates twentieth-and twenty-first-century arguments that Deaf people occupy a crucial aspect in the fold of human diversity. In a time when the existence of Deaf people is being called into question by legislative acts such as Britain's...