I’ve been working on a book project about Victorian representations and narratives of speech dysfluency for a number of years now, and I’m starting to see a dim shape for the entire project. I think it now has an introduction and a skeleton of chapters, but who knows if I’ll radically blow things up and completely reorganize the thing. As of today, I’m staring, with excitement, at what I hope will be a summer of relatively uninterrupted writing, so I thought I would give our readers a glimpse at some extraneous material from my introduction and early chapters. Basically, some of this material is in the book, some of it isn’t, and some of it is in the book but written in different ways. In a sense, the following paragraphs attempt to outline what I see as some fundamental problems in the ways in which Victorian studies and cultural studies appropriate or misuse metaphors of stuttering and stammering, or dysfluency in general. This is my contribution to thinking about speech dysfluency both within the paradigm of disability studies and more broadly in current critical practices in Victorian studies.
Writing about the countless representations and metaphors of speech dysfluency in Victorian literature and culture is a challenging endeavor because stuttering – whether as an aspect of agency, an experience of embodiment, or as metaphor – is both everywhere and nowhere in literature, criticism, and cultural theory. Give or take a few exceptions, literary and disability critics often ignore actual representations of the mysterious disorder of developmental stuttering, preferring instead to rely on metaphors of dysfluent, blocked, or hesitant speech in their analyses of literature and modern culture from the nineteenth-century to the present. As a result, there is currently no sustained literary criticism of representations and narratives of the mysterious disorder of stuttering, in Victorian studies or elsewhere, although work is forthcoming in an emerging subfield of disability studies that Chris Eagle has recently called “dysfluency studies.” Instead, literary critics too often privilege the ubiquitous trope of stuttering in a wide range of topics in cultural and critical theory, the result of which has been a privileging of stuttering as a concept that actually ignores the peculiar experience of language and embodiment characterized by adult developmental stuttering.