Chapter 8 - Prostheses

Summary

This chapter covers literary representations of prostheses in a wide range of historical periods to outline the difference that literature can make in challenging the dominant technological narrative and reframing it in terms of human uses. Taking as emblematic a pair of short stories by William Faulkner (“The Leg”) and Flannery O’Connor (“Good Country People”), Hall argues that these works do more than simply register shifts in prosthetic technology, but also challenge normalizing discourses through forms that “resist any urge toward stable order, whether narrative, social, or bodily.” “Language and storytelling are important to our understanding of prosthesis,” Hall argues, “because anxieties, hopes, and fantasies about enablement, modification, and enhancement, as well as the powerful fiction of the ‘normate,’ are reinforced but also renegotiated in literary and cultural spaces.”