Tag Archives | Brent Cline

Cline, Brent Walter. “Great Clumsy Dinosaurs: The Disabled Body in the Posthuman World.”  In Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, edited by Kathryn Allan, 131-143. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

In science fiction, technology often modifies, supports, and attempts to ‘make normal’ the disabled body. In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars — with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history — discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical ‘cures,’ technology, and the body in science fiction. Bringing together the fields of disability studies and science fiction, this book explores the ways dis/abled bodies use prosthetics to challenge common ideas about ability and human being, as well as proposes new understandings of what ‘technology as cure’ means for people with disabilities in a (post)human future.

Cline, Brent Walter. “‘ You’re Not the Same Kind of Human Being’: The Evolution of Pity to Horror in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2012).

Abstract: Of American novels that engage with the topic of mental disability, few are more popular than Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon. Such popularity seems based on a simplistic reading of the novel where the mentally disabled are objects of good-natured compassion. A more thorough reading of how Charlie Gordon is presented, however, leads to the conclusion that mental disability is the embodiment of death in the novel. Readers are first taught to pity the pre-operative Charlie, but once they come to respond to the ethical voice of the post-operative Charlie, his regression to his original state becomes the rhetorical villain in the novel. At first an object of pity, the mentally disabled Charlie Gordon eventually becomes the metaphorical horror of oblivion that no character has the power to overcome.