Theory Session - Jeremy Colangelo

Drawing from feminist criticism and disability studies, this paper examines the textual and social construction of authorial self-sufficiency in narratives of artistic development. Focusing primarily on the story of Judith Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and two works by her contemporary George Egerton, the paper develops the concept of conspicuous assistance – that is, forms of assistance which serve as performative markers inscribing a person as one who is assisted, or as in some way disabled. The paper concludes that the construction of the artistically “abled” autonomous artist proceeds by rendering assistance invisible, or inconspicuous. This process allows Woolf and Edgerton to construct woman artist characters who rebel against sexist expectations of female inability by piggybacking on the very processes by which the illusion of male superiority is created: hiding or obscuring the networks of assistance and co-dependency which all artists rely on, so to give the impression that the artist stands on their own. Untangling this process thus provides a window into the construction of ability as such, and is thus of great interest to disability theorists as well as scholars of gender and modernism.   

Bio: Jeremy Colangelo is the author of Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature and the editor of Joyce Writing Disability. His articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Modern Drama, and Genre. He is currently a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow and teaches at the University of Western Ontario.