Abstract

Truman Capote’s 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms offers a rich vantage point from which to consider the place of disability in the modernist Bildungsroman. The novel’s focus on forms of immobility, disability mentorship, and disability community both engages and revises classical and modernist Bildungsroman tropes. Here, I consider disability narrative’s relationship to late modernist life writing, and therefore intervene in conventional notions of the able-bodied protagonist. I link this relationship to recent discussions of transability, or the able-bodied desire to become disabled, and I argue that representations of disability in Capote’s novel may depathologize this phenomenon.

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