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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.
Harvard University Press
January 2006
352 pages ISBN: 0674019377 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Memoir
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?
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