Dec 2: "Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error"

Join us for the fourth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025/2026 Winter semester! This time we are pleased to host Michael Davidson from University of California, San Diego with a lecture titled "Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error".

Tuesday, Dec 2, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
Room: 2.118
3 OZN

Distressing Language is about the aesthetics of error - mistakes of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. It is also about the role of disability and deafness in contemporary cultural forms and how physical and intellectual difference challenge generic terms for art and poetry.
The talk’s title combines the idea of a language that disturbs or causes anxiety with language that is ripped, worn, or damaged. This interplay brings together the social environment in which
language is exchanged with the materiality of words that frustrate easy comprehension. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when
words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non- disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of “sounding good?” Distressing Language grows out of the author’s experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence, not as a deficit but as a gain.


Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His work has focused on modern and contemporary American poetry, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies and deaf studies. His books on poetics include Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His work in disability studies includes Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford U Press, 2019) and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error (New York U Press, 2022). He is also the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013), and editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002).

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