It is a truism of modernist studies that the period is dominated by an ocularcentric imperative, manifested in the retinal art of cubism, the imagist poetry of Ezra Pound and H.D., or the “spatial form” of novels by William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and James Joyce. The emergence of photography, film, and the modern city, with its crowds, spectacles, and exhibitions, is usually adduced as contributing to this move. In Deafening Modernism Rebecca Sanchez suggests that for deaf persons who use sign language, a visual poetics is hardly news. Her book explores what it might mean to explore modernism's “embodied language” (31) through a deaf optic, or what she calls “deaf epistemology” (3). She is less interested in studying deaf authors or novelists who represent deaf characters than in testing literary innovation against models of language provided by manual signing.

The historical backdrop to her study is the politics of language beginning in the late nineteenth century that often served as an adjunct to national and cultural consolidation. English-only language protocols, oralist education for deaf children, prohibitions against Native language in Indian boarding schools all emphasized what Sanchez calls “communicative norms” that were challenged both by the practice of manual signing and by modernist innovation (26). What would it be like to situate, say, the poetics of impersonality or objectivist poetics not through their debts to symbolism or psychoanalysis, but against the backdrop of linguistic and biopolitical standardization? How does the embodied aspect of American Sign Language (ASL) challenge instrumental reason and technological rationality? How do canonical modernist works implicitly anticipate aspects of sign language into experimental narrative forms? To answer such questions Sanchez looks at works by Sherwood Anderson, Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, William Faulkner and others through a “deaf optic” while subjecting the sign-language poetry of Clayton Valli, Debbie Rennie, and Peter Cook to modernist formal strategies. The result is a compelling, provocative revision of modernism from a d/Deaf perspective.

As a contribution to disability studies, Deafening Modernism challenges the ways that language protocols erase the body as a communicative vehicle. Many of the texts she studies – Modern Times (1936), Tender Buttons (1914), Winesberg, Ohio (1919), The Sound and the Fury (1929) – complicate those norms by presenting characters who either don't speak (Chaplin), speak incoherently (characters in Winesberg, Ohio), or repeat phrases endlessly (Gertrude Stein), or whose nontraditional forms of talking (Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury) defy normative expectations. She buttresses her arguments about nontraditional language use by a clear and useful overview of sign-language history, from Gallaudet's first encounter with French signers and the formation of Gallaudet University to the researches of Sokoe, Bellugi, and others who first established ASL as a “language” and not a crude gestural equivalent of English.

Sanchez emphasizes that a deaf epistemology is not simply the way that deaf people think but a “resource for understanding the history of American language politics and the impact that history has had on modernist aesthetic production … by reframing questions that have been central to both” (31). This is the book's most important contribution to both modernism and disability studies. It regards deafness not as an impairment or sensory loss but as a generative way to think about the self-evident status of sound, orality, textuality, voice, and knowledge. As a consequence we may be able to think about how T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality represents an effacement of the body and sensation, or how the primitivism of Josephine Baker's dance made visible – and threatening – that same embodiment, or how the “grotesques” of Anderson's Winesberg live their subaltern status by their inability to communicate (79). At the same time, Sanchez displays how the signed poetry of Clayton Valli and Debbie Rennie uses the fullest implications of a spatial poetics by their ability to layer multiple meanings simultaneously, a feature that embodies in practice what Ezra Pound theorized as the advantage offered by the Chinese ideogram.

Sanchez's title offers a nice double entendre – a modernism that deafens by refusing the implicit assumption of language as speech and sound and a modernism that embeds ideas of deafness in its aesthetic formation. It's a daring thesis, one that can be challenged on a number of fronts. One might quibble with her view that modernist authors became celebrities in our contemporary sense of the term. Is Eliot's impersonality really an escape from the body so much as an escape from the poet's own psychological maladies? And alternately, is Clayton Valli's poetry a form of “embodied impersonality” simply because signing makes the “poet's ‘personality’ … always already visible” (45)? Many of Valli's poems make use of the same kinds of distancing metaphor or “objective correlatives” that one associates with Eliot. On the other hand her reading of Chaplin's Modern Times as a “silent film” about Chaplin's embodied expressivity is truly revelatory. She describes the famous scene where Chaplin is forced to sing in front of a dinner crowd, having forgotten the words. He thus uses his expressive body to mask the gibberish he substitutes for the missing words, a gesture Sanchez sees as Chaplin's own coy response to the emerging authority of talking films.

There's much to mine in this important book for people who have thought a good deal about modernist aesthetics without imagining constituencies for whom the materiality of language could be rendered through the body. And it will be an important addition to the field of deaf studies as it moves beyond a cultural nationalism based on ASL to a more cosmopolitan engagement with modernist aesthetics within and beyond hearing culture.