CFP: Discourse and Disability: Constructing Disability through Speech Acts

Organizer: Alison Purnell

Organizer: Michael Nagy ; michael.nagy@sdstate.edu

Delivery Mode: Virtual

Principal Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Speech Act Society

Co-Sponsoring Organization(s): Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages

In the rapidly-expanding field of Medieval Disability Studies, thus far little attention has been paid to the potential that discourse analysis, pragmatics, and speech act theory have for understanding medieval disabilities. These tools enable twenty-first-century scholars to address how medieval texts construct, navigate, and deconstruct disability through conversation and direct address on all social levels. Papers discussing disability in the Middle Ages using any aspect of speech act theory, pragmatics, or discourse analysis are welcomed and sources may be literary, theological, philosophical, or documentary in nature.