“For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts”: Dis/enabling Narratives and the Affect of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta”

Prof Chris Foss, University of Mary Washington

Date: Wednesday 1 March, 2017
Time: 2.15pm–3.45pm
Place: EDEN 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Prof Foss argues that Wilde’s fairy tale about the death of a performing Dwarf at the Spanish court allows for a complex consideration of the role the affect of pity plays within Victorian sentimentalism.  “Birthday” may appear mired in damaging stereotype and maudlin melodrama, but it also suggests more progressive emotionally-based possibilities for sympathy, acceptance, and even identification.  Wilde’s text invites readers to recognize its seemingly simultaneous manipulation of the narrative toward a reliance upon and a critique of the consumption of pain necessary to the workings of the affect of pity.  It further forces readers to acknowledge their own complicity in this pity and pain, ultimately revealing crucial complexities inherent in such emotional responses to disability.  

Chris Foss is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, where he specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, with a secondary expertise in disability studies. He is Editorial Adviser for the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and one of the editors of Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives (2016). He also has published on disability-related topics in Disability Studies Quarterly, Pedagogy, and the book collection Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media.  

This seminar is part of the CCDS series, Disability and the Emotions. Other dates include:
10 May 2017, A secret worth knowing, Michael Rembis.

Also, Disability and Disciplines, the International Conference on Educational, Cultural, and Disability Studies is taking place 5-6 July, 2017.

For further information please contact: Dr David Bolt