'And All That Is In Between': A Critical/Creative Exploration of Language, Otherness and The Role of The Contemporary Writer

This project is divided into two components; a novel in short stories entitled And All That Is In Between and an accompanying critical thesis. The novel centers upon two interconnected families, each story told from a different character’s perspective and moving between different countries and time periods, encompassing the recent refugee crisis, the Syrian civil war and the Holocaust. The novel’s themes are disability, migration, grief and language, and the novel specifically seeks to examine the role that communication plays in connecting people across the divides of difference. The first and second chapters of the critical thesis discuss the play Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff and the collection of short stories, Chattering by Louise Stern. Chapter one looks

at the theme of D/deaf education and language supremacy, drawing on the work of Harlan Lane to argue that education has typically been the site in which D/deaf

community’s cultural and linguistic heritage has been dismantled through the unwilling enforcement of hearing people’s language and normative expectations. Chapter two explores the problematic use of metaphor in disability narratives, and uses the work of Amy Vidali to argue that D/deaf characters in Chattering and Children of a Lesser God reclaim the use of metaphor from the associations which hearing society have created and perpetuated through literature. Chapter three examines the choices of writers when creating characters outside of their own identity, and the contention that this can evoke. I use my own text as a focus for these questions and examine my own process of questioning and self-reflection when writing And All That is in Between. The thesis concludes by analyzing key the most prominent theme of the novel, the concept of ‘in between’ and how it relates to many of the topics of the novel, focussing specifically on education, borders and grief. It also gives a brief literary review and commentary on decisions in regards to structure and form.