"Plugging In" [electronic resource] : disability and the body electric in contemporary American literature

This study shows how contemporary American authors provide a new understanding of disability that also challenges long-held assumptions about postwar information culture. My readings analyze portrayals of disability in contemporary literature that figure the disabled body as a communication system that can be electronically manipulated or "plugged in." This mode of literary characterization, I argue, stems from early information theory and communication engineering. The idiom of "plugging in"—what I define as a literary representation and a cybernetic action of embodiment—that circulates in American fiction and in public discourse further reveals how disability and material technologies interrelate. Charting the disabled body's transformation into a "body electric" from the early Cold War era to the present, this dissertation offers a cultural and literary framework for understanding human-machine interaction. By most critical accounts, the discipline of cybernetics decoupled information and human bodies. My readings reorient this narrative, demonstrating that the theory of information was rooted in the disabled body all along. I show how, for example, mathematician Norbert Wiener's little known prototype for a prosthesis transformed amputee stumps into myoelectric "sockets" that relayed neural information. When we attend to these material configurations, we see how cybernetics preserved a specific kind of "dysfunctional" body distinguished by neurological disorders and missing limbs in the design of its information machines. I contend that contemporary authors such as Bernard Wolfe, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Alice B. Sheldon, William Gibson, and John Scalzi sustain this legacy by adopting disability as a heuristic tool for understanding new modes of electronic communication. Their stories frame a historical arc that identifies four interlocking technoscientific movements from the late 1940s to the present: the rise of cybernetics in the early Cold War Era (1940s-60s); the emergence of the cyborg—or what literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles calls "the body of information"—during the Space Race and countercultural era; nascent computing and Internet culture in the 1980s; and global information culture and the turn toward brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in the twenty-first century. The texts I read in the first three chapters, from Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (1952) to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), offer a corrective to histories of science and technology in which the disabled body is largely absent. The final chapter concludes with a study of speculative fiction in the new millennium that turns to disability as a collective site to imagine more inclusive technological futures. This project ultimately argues that contemporary literature provides an antidote to prevailing cultural accounts that that myopically frame disability as a historically inert subject position, revealing that disabled bodies actively shape the way we use and understand technology today.

Keywords: English.
Advisor: Lunsford Andrea A.
McGurl Mark
Heise Ursula K. advisor. Thesis advisor
Turner Fred advisor. Thesis advisor