What are disability poetics? What does it mean to invoke such a thing? Why should we? These are questions I’ve been asking myself and my students for most of the year, especially in several reviews I’ve written of works by disabled artists. I always seem to circle around an answer without ever reaching one that…
Author: Pasquale Toscano
Pasquale Toscano is a scholar/critic, teacher, and writer, whose work has appeared in "The New York Times," "Vox," "The Atlantic," "Disability Studies Quarterly," and the "Classical Receptions Journal," among other publications. An assistant professor of English at Vassar College, he focuses on Renaissance literature, Milton, classical reception/Black classicism, and disability studies. His current book project--tentatively entitled "'Stand and Wait': Dynamics of Physical Dis/ability in the Epic Tradition"--explores the foundational importance of physical incapacity to a genre where we'd hardly expect it to have any purchase at all: epic. His recognitions include a Rhodes Scholarship, the Harold Grimm Prize from the Sixteenth-Century Society (for scholarship on the Reformation), and a 2024 Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton's top honor for graduate students.
The Crip Poetics of Paradoxical Concession
For the brilliant students of ENG 341 To date online as a disabled gay man means disclosing your limp to someone who likely has more than a soupçon of concern for fitness. At least, it means doing so eventually. One’s profile could cop to using a cane and brace, of course, but mine doesn’t, for…
Unfitness, Utopianism, and the Ugly Backwardness of Progressive Beauty
For the members of my inaugural class: the brilliant first-years of “Succession” When the film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, was released to that rare mix of critical and popular esteem in 2018, I knew I was supposed to like it—not just as a progressive but as a critic myself. Indeed, I did: it’s…
“Misshaped parts did them appall”: The Purulent Paradox of the “Skinny Fat” Body
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), an allegorical romance epic, begins with Redcross, the fledgling hero of holiness who struggles to live up to his name. Time and again, he veers from the steady camaraderie of Una—an embodiment of the one, true, Protestant church—for the femme fatale Duessa, who’s stunning to look at but rotten…
Negotiating Nature: Mike Johnson, Richard III, and the God’s Honest Truth
Before he was elected Speaker of the House on 25 Oct. 2023, Mike Johnson seems to have eluded the spotlight with the fancy footwork of a ballerina dancing into it. Then, suddenly, people cared about his opinions on the issues most dividing Americans today. In a recent Fox News interview, Johnson explained his worldview only…
Walking Steadily Once Again: Miracles, Biblical Epic, and the Heroics of Healing
A man who isn’t simply blind but speechless and possessed (Matt. 12.22-3); a paralytic who’s prostrate by an inaccessible fountain (John 1-15); someone who’s sightless, his eyes spat on and caked with mud (John 9.1-12): all three walk not into a bar but back to their homes, to tell of a healer named Jesus. I…
The Head of a Dog or Horn of a Rhino: Meaning, Milton, and Me
THE HEAD OF A DOG OR HORN OF A RHINO: MEANING, MILTON, & ME [H]e reproaches me with want of beauty and loss of sight: “A monster huge and hideous, void of sight.” … [B]ut he immediately corrects himself, and says, “though not indeed huge, for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled and bloodless…
“There Goes the Monster”: gazing at blind men in Restoration tragedy, part II
In my last article for Synapsis on Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), I mentioned that much of the tragedy is concerned with the fact that its blind hero is “[m]ade of his enemies the scorn and gaze” (34).[1] It’s worth highlighting this thematic epicenter not only because scholars more often emphasize Restoration political debates than disability…
“Let Be Assigned Some Narrow Place Enclosed”: Requesting Accommodations Has Always Been Tricky Business
Pasquale S. Toscano // I often reflect that since many days of darkness are destined to everyone, as the wise man warns, mine thus far, by the signal kindness of Providence, between leisure and study, and the voices and visits of friends, are much more mild than those lethal ones. John Milton, “To Leonard Philaras”…
Austen, Expectations, and Crips in the World
Pasquale S. Toscano // I’ve been reading a great deal of Jane Austen lately, which is odd, because I’ve never considered myself a fan of the grande dame of English letters. All of her plots are so damn predictable, and well—how shall we put this—quaint. And then there are those maddeningly handsome gentlemen and far-too-fetching…