Stutter - Hardcover

Shell, Marc

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674019377 ISBN 13: 9780674019379

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2006

Synopsis

One person can't help stuttering. The other can't help laughing. And in the way one bodily betrayal of better intentions mirrors the other, we find ourselves in the gray area where mind and body connect--and, at the damnedest moments, disconnect. In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Marc Shell plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. Looking into the difficulties encountered by people who stutter--as do fifty million worldwide--Shell shows that, however solitary stutterers may be in their quest for normalcy, they share a kinship with many other speakers, both impeded and fluent.

Stutter takes us back to a time when stuttering was believed to be "diagnosis-induced," then on to the complex mix of physical and psychological causes that were later discovered. Ranging from cartoon characters like Porky Pig to cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, from Moses to Hamlet, Shell reveals how stuttering in literature plays a role in the formation of tone, narrative progression, and character. He considers such questions as: Why does stuttering disappear when the speaker chants? How does singing ease the verbal tics of Tourette's Syndrome? How do stutterers cope with the inexpressible, the unspeakable?

Written by someone who has himself struggled with stuttering all his life, this provocative and wide-ranging book shows that stuttering has implications for myriad types of expression and helps to define what it means to be human.

About this title

About the Author

Marc Shell is Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Harvard University.

Reviews

Shell offers an impressive if challenging memoir-cum-treatise on the contributions of stuttering to the arts and beyond. Shell, who teaches comparative literature at Harvard, is fluent in cultures high, middle and low. He lunges between Moses and Marilyn Monroe, quoting rap music and Winston Churchill in nearly the same breath. Although it's often difficult to keep up with Shell's academic critiques, there are touching passages about his experiences growing up in Quebec with a stutter (and with polio, the subject of his previous book). Surrounded by languages—French, English, Hebrew and Yiddish—Shell learned to find the "right" word, that is, the pronounceable one, in another tongue. Similarly, he suggests that many great writers, such as Margaret Drabble, Lewis Carroll and W. Somerset Maugham, took up the pen as a way to "cure" their stuttering, and that their difficulty with spoken words improved their facility with those written. Shell's virtuosic ability to summon references from neuroscience, religion and philosophy is both exhilarating and exhausting. Indeed, at times it seems as if the structure of his peripatetic book is a metaphor for what happens in the mind of a stutterer in the pause before articulation: a frantic search through the mind that finally alights in the right place. 18 b&w illus. (Jan.)
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Shell, a comparative-literature professor and a stutterer, examines stuttering from the perspectives of history, literature, popular culture, science, and personal experience. His discussion raises fascinating questions—Why do stutterers find relief when singing? Was Hamlet a stutterer? Why is Porky Pig's stutter funny?—and he provides an engaging discussion of the historical importance of speaking "properly." Regrettably, Shell, presumably striving for some textual equivalent of a stutter, encumbers his work with labored puns ("how gags gag"), odd catchphrases ("talk the walk or walk the talk"), and the modish deconstruction of words ("dis-ease," "dis-ability"). However, there are many interesting tidbits about famous stutterers (James Earl Jones, Moses, Marilyn Monroe, the Emperor Claudius, Henry James) and their techniques for overcoming the impediment.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674019377
• ISBN 13: 9780674019379
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352