{"id":154074,"date":"2020-02-11T13:15:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T18:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/?p=154074"},"modified":"2020-02-13T13:18:52","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T18:18:52","slug":"foss-publishes-book-review-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/2020\/02\/11\/foss-publishes-book-review-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Foss Publishes Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Professor

Professor of English Chris Foss<\/p><\/div>\n

Professor of English Chris Foss has published an approximately 1600-word book review of Chris Gabbard\u2019s\u00a0A Life Beyond Reason<\/i>\u00a0in the most recent number of the journal\u00a0Eighteenth Century Studies<\/i>. Gabbard was hired out of Stanford by the University of North Florida because of his expertise in the literature of the British Enlightenment. His book, however, is no scholarly monograph on the Age of Reason, but rather a moving personal memoir chronicling his family\u2019s life and times in their own very different Augustan Age, a period which commenced with the birth of his son August. This amazing boy lived for 14 years facing a litany of diagnoses stemming from the complications of an obstructed labor: \u201ccerebral palsy, spastic quadriplegia, profound mental retardation, cortical visual impairment, microcephaly, seizure disorder, osteopenia\u2014and the list went on\u201d (35). There is pain and suffering aplenty in this narrative, along with understandable doses of anger and frustration, but above all this is a story about love and joy, and long before one reaches the final page it is abundantly clear that Gabbard\u2019s Augustan Age has not ended with an untimely death from pneumonia; the child lives on not only in the author\u2019s memory, but through this book in the hearts and minds of every reader who meets him and comes to appreciate the many lessons a life beyond reason holds for all.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"

A Life Beyond Reason book cover<\/p><\/div>\n

Socrates\u2019s dictum that \u201cthe unexamined life is not worth living\u201d (11) serves as the pivot upon which Gabbard transforms his whole understanding of what matters in life, for August\u2019s cognitive capacity prevents him from ever being able to examine his life in this way, and yet Gabbard finds plenty of worth in the pleasure August not merely experiences but expresses through shrieks of glee and squawks of delight, through his contagious laughter. Gabbard credits disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson, and her public debates with philosopher Peter Singer, as crystalizing his new position on what exactly constitutes a life worth living. Singer\u2019s position on decriminalizing child euthanasia is based on a belief that disabled lives \u201cwill be permeated with suffering and therefore will not be worth living\u201d is informed by a belief that equates personhood with \u201ccharacteristics like rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness\u201d (100). The accomplished and articulate Johnson not only embodied how an individual\u2019s life with a severe disability is anything but \u201cintrinsically suboptimal\u201d (100), but she further revealed how relationships with such persons, far from being worthless, can in fact be \u201cprofoundly beautiful\u201d (103).<\/p>\n

Gabbard offers Coleridge likely would judge him (as he did Wordsworth\u2019s Betty Foy from \u201cThe Idiot Boy\u201d) as an \u201cimpersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment,\u201d for \u201cwhat is love,\u201d he continues, \u201cif not \u2018instinct abandoned by judgment\u2019?\u201d (104). With this epiphany, life beyond reason in his own Age of Johnson\/Augustan Age clarifies \u201cit is not the unexamined life that is not worth living but the life without love\u201d (104). Drawing on the \u201cland of interdependence\u201d he finds in Donne\u2019s \u201cMeditation 17\u201d (85), Gabbard posits his shared experiences with his son constitute \u201ca mutually beneficial ethics of care\u201d (108). Attuned to \u201cAugust\u2019s little ways\u201d\u2014\u201cthe twitch of his lips, the shift of an eyebrow,\u201d his grins and grimaces, his fussing and laughing\u2014Gabbard views their connection not as \u201cadhering to a so\u2014called custodial care model\u201d but instead as \u201ccharacterized neither by his dependence on me not by my surrender of independence to him\u201d (108). That is, while they \u201cdepended upon one another in radically different ways,\u201d the father\u2019s caregiving was anything but \u201cselfless\u201d: \u201cI needed him as much as he needed me. If I didn\u2019t love him, all of this effort would have been a grudging sacrifice. But he made me happy, and, so, in our peculiar way, we split everything down the middle\u201d (109).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor of English Chris Foss has published an approximately 1600-word book review of Chris Gabbard\u2019s\u00a0A Life Beyond Reason\u00a0in the most recent number of the journal\u00a0Eighteenth Century Studies. Gabbard was hired out of Stanford by the University of North Florida because of his expertise in the literature of the British Enlightenment. His book, however, is no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28591,"featured_media":154075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[234,9043],"class_list":{"0":"post-154074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-professional-notes","8":"tag-cfoss","9":"tag-department-of-english-linguistics-and-communication","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28591"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}