Kaliane Ung

“Wounded Writings: Disability in France” focuses on first-person accounts of disability across literary genres. The manuscript is structured around four “situated experiences” of disability: the war wound, mental illness, neurodivergence, and skin disorders. By investigating writing as a performative and transformative act, it offers a reassessment of agency in the face of adversity, through self-invention. It argues that writing is a tool for survival when illness and suffering alter the body and claims that, in modern and contemporary France, the wound becomes a site of enunciation as well as a site of transformation. The book will have an online companion website.