Interview with the editors Prof. Dr. Klaus Birnstiel and Dr. Johannes Görbert
The two editors of the new Rombach Wissenschaft series Disability – Literature – Culture spoke to our publisher about the first volume, which has been published this year. The volume Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. British and Continental Perspectives – edited by Prof. Dr. Klaus Birnstiel, Dr. Johannes Görbert and Dr. Harriet Cooper – is a collection of twelve contributions, which develop innovative approaches for analysing embodied difference in literature and culture. Find out more about the book in our interview with the editors of the series:
This volume is the first publication in the new series “Disability – Literature – Culture”. Why did you choose this book to launch the series?
“Because this volume does in practice what the series sets out to do. “Disability – Literature – Culture” wants to establish literary and cultural disability studies firmly in the German-speaking world, in close dialogue with international research. The book performs that dialogue on every level: leading British voices such as Tom Shakespeare and Stuart Murray write alongside scholars from Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden; canonical and popular German-language texts – Kafka, Storm, Spyri’s Heidi – are read with Anglophone theory, while Continental traditions, from ‘Motivgeschichte’ to Jürgen Link’s theory of normalism, are made productive for English-speaking readers. The volume grew out of the 2023 Fribourg conference of the DFG network “Inclusive Philology”, which pursues exactly this agenda. And there is a matter of principle: a series about disability should begin without barriers. Thanks to the University of Greifswald, the entire volume is open access, free for everyone.”
The volume brings together a wide range of methodological approaches. Could you give one example of how two (or more) different perspectives complement each other and lead to a new insight?
“Take the chapter on Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis and its reception by the Swiss writer Christoph Keller, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy and rereads Gregor Samsa with a jolt of recognition: “Samsa has SMA!” Two traditions meet in the analysis. The American concept of the ‘kill or cure’ narrative (Mitchell/Snyder) identifies the plot pattern: a disabled character disrupts an order and is ‘smoothed over’ – ‘healed’ or dead – by the end. Jürgen Link’s German theory of normalism explains the world that demands this: Kafka’s rigid ‘protonormalism’, in which any deviation is sanctioned. Only together do the two show what changes in Keller’s literary response, the “Bug Story”: under today’s more flexible normalism, the insect protagonist survives, keeps his mobility, his relationship, his place in the middle of life, and it is society that is asked to adapt. Neither framework alone captures this shift ‘from vermin to superhero’. Similar productive fusions run through the entire volume.”
For readers who are new to literary and cultural disability studies: what is one key idea or perspective from the volume that might surprise them?
“That disability is not a marginal special topic, but one of literature’s structural forces. Newcomers often expect disability studies to count characters or grade portrayals as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The volume shows something more fundamental: disability shapes literary form itself. Once you know the ‘kill or cure’ pattern – the disabled figure who disturbs a story’s order and must be healed or gone by its end – you recognise it everywhere: in Grete’s verdict “It has to go” on her transformed brother in Kafka, in Klara’s miracle cure in Heidi, in countless plots up to the present. And a second surprise, from Harriet Cooper’s closing chapter: today the problem may be reversed. Disability experience is no longer invisible but highly marketable (“selves sell, disability sells”), and visibility alone is not yet emancipation. Whoever reads this volume may find that familiar classics and bestselling memoirs never look quite the same again.”
The volume addresses scholars in literary and cultural studies as well as anyone interested in trans-disciplinary disability studies approaches and cross-cultural academic exchange.
