The Body in the Body of My Work

Reading literature has long been viewed as an escape from the body, an edifying removal from the immediacy of experience and a necessary check on essentialism. This essay reconsiders that truism by charting the relationship between the body of a scholar and the body of her work, a journey that begins with the advent of the Iraq War and the intention to make the war present to American students by teaching the representation of war in the literature of the eighteenth century, a period of nearly continuous military conflict. That focus leads to the reframing of the value of literature as connected to its refusal to ignore bodily vulnerabilities, insights informed by the recent growth in disability studies, body studies, and trauma theory as well as the writer's own awareness of her body's vulnerabilities. The essay concludes by arguing that scholars can engage the materiality of bodies without forfeiting historicity or the storied virtues of literary "disinterestedness," and that bodies matter when we read, particularly to the bodies that read in the here and now.