Writing and the Body. For the past several years, while still working on topics in the English Renaissance, I have become interested in language: its nature and use, how conditions like deafness and blindness affect narrative, how children acquire (or fail to acquire) language, how assumptions about language, explicit and implicit, inform current literary theory.

In a 1991 conference paper on Helen Keller I questioned the moment when, at age 11, she was accused of plagiarism. The occasion for the paper was a literature-and-law conference on intellectual property and the idea of authorship, and the more I looked at this bizarre moment (Mark Twain called Helen's accusers a group of "solemn donkeys" and "decayed human turnips"), the more it invited fundamental questions about language. Most of all, it invited questions about how anyoneñ-not just Helen Kellerñ-becomes the active subject of a culture, making it one's own, a process that involves acquiring not only the language but the look and feel of a culture and of its guiding concepts and social narratives. An expanded essay, "Touching Words: Helen Keller, Plagiarism, Authorship," was published first in a law review, then in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Duke UP, 1994).

Since then, I have been writing and offering courses to include viewpoints of other disciplines concerned with language during the twentieth century: philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and computer science. These just happen to be the disciplines that have come together in the last thirty years to form the new discipline of cognitive science, and I am now a member of UB's Center for Cognitive Science, energized and challenged by the weekly colloquia and ongoing conversations with colleagues across disciplines.

Disability Studies. Also, my work on Helen Keller has taken me into the new field of disability studies, and my writing and teaching are often directly concerned with questions about disability. My essay, "Disabilities, Bodies, Voices", appears in a volume on the theory and pedagogy of this field, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (MLA Press, 2002).

Music and Mathematics. I am at work on a chapter concerning a British musician--an expert in sixteenth century choral music and a prominent conductor--who suffered a violent encephalitis and lost important short-term memory functions. That is, he cannot transform experience in the present into long-term memory: if his wife returns after a two-hour absence, he greets her as if he hadn't seen her for two years. He can still play keyboard music, he can still conduct a choral piece, he still appears to have mastery of the language. But he spends much of his time playing Solitaire and writing repeatedly every seven or eight minutes that, for the first time ever, he is conscious. (A film titled Prisoner of Consciousness documents his case.)

The aim of the chapter is to analyze the semiotics of number in this man's card playing and musical activity, as a way of clarifying some questions about the nature of language. In the twentieth century, language has been the subject of intense cognitive research in the hope of modeling it computationally on the basis of its relation to mathematical logic. This effort has generated numerous problems in philosophy, psychology, linguistics--and generally in the theory of meaning--and my aim is to clarify questions relating to these problems. I will be presented a paper drawn on this work at the October, 2000, SLS conference in Atlanta.

Renaissance Poetics. I have returned recently to an interest in prosody, working out an analysis of the consequences of experiments made by Sidney, Spenser, and their friends during the late 1570's in adapting the quantitative meters of classical Latin poetry to the practice of writing poems in English. These experiments are usually judged to be failures, because the experimental poems do not work well, and because the poets themselves soon abandoned the project. But analysis shows that there is no way to understand the sudden brilliance of poetic writing in the 1580's and 1590's (by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and others) except, in large part, as a consequence of the quantitative experiments. These experiments, I argue, taught poets the rhythmic possibilities of their own language and provided them with a range of expressive potential for which they had no models before.

I presented a paper making this argument, "Classical Quantitative Meters and the Transformation of Formal Rhythmic Space in Elizabethan Poetry," at the annual conference of the North East Modern Language Association (NEMLA). I am expanding the paper into a full article, in which I argue that the Elizabethan experiments and their consequences parallel experiments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that gave rise to free verse--that, in fact, there is a close relationship between the activities of both groups of poets, and that the relationship has much to do with the material, biologically specific features of the English language underlying its characteristic prosodies. Some of this work was featured in a seminar in sixteenth century literature that I taught in the fall semester of 2000.