Much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies. This book seeks to broaden the conversation through a range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairs's oeuvre, demonstrating her provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.

Much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies. This book seeks to broaden the conversation through a range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairs's oeuvre, demonstrating her provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.

Plaintext is a warm, witty, extraoridnarily candid collection of essays that explore in very personal terms the quality and custom of women's lives. In order to understand how her own life has been shaped, Nancy Mairs discloses her hard-won but life-affirming struggle to become a woman fully and solely responsible for herself. Crippled by multiple sclerosis, frustrated and maddened by chronic depression and acute agoraphobia, Mairs explores the roots of her "dis-ease." But she does not allow herself to be diminished by cultural assumptions or illness. She has learned to swagger in the face of unusual rigors and loss, and in these essays, Mairs shares with us the lessons of her life so that we too may learn how to establish the plaintext of our own existence.

In a new collection of essays, the celebrated author of Plaintext reconstructs her past by exploring her erotic and emotional development in order to lay claim to her life--and women's lives in general.

Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of A Million Little Pieces, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers’ claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, “How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it’s true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, ‘This is really true’? Why do they choose to say it then?” The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means. Contributors: John D’Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn, introduces a new ethical horizon distinct from, but in continuous interaction with ,conventional ethics. Spanning a great variety of media forms – from painting and photography to film, video, literature, fashion, graffiti, and installation art – this interdisciplinary collection offers a thorough reconceptualization of the relation between the aesthetics and the ethics of images and represents an innovative addition to the field of visual culture studies.

Emerging Perspectives on Disability Studies brings together up-and-coming scholars whose works expand disability studies into new interdisciplinary contexts. This includes new perspectives on disability identity; historical constructions of (dis)ability; the geography of disability; the spiritual nature of disability; governmentality and disability rights; neurodiversity and challenges to medicalized constructions of autism; and questions of citizenship and participation in political and sexual economies. In sum, this volume uses disability studies as an innovative framework for its investigation into what it means to be human.