read >> If You Don’t Know Me by Now: The Failure of Care

If You Don’t Know Me by Now: The Failure of Care /y/  in “Bartleby, The Scrivener”  - by Kari Nixon - 2014  | dsq Disability Studies Quarterly |    //(here via ggl negativism bartleby  actually no fr that to ggl  "lead to Bartleby’s tragic end")
Abstract:   An approach to the story wh takes as its starting point a critique of the medical model of disability 
...makes it clear that given his situation in a world which values a medically inspired model of understanding difference, the narrator, benevolent as he may be, can never do enough for Bartleby, because, given this situation, he can never ask the right questions of Bartleby or posit appropriate solutions for him.  //  ... appropr solutns ? really are there any?    wh are the qstns?




19th-century literature, medical models, Bartleby, Melville, diagnosis

discerning the ethical standing of the narrator in this tale is not truly the issue that Melville begs readers to consider. Rather, when a disability theory-inspired reading is taken to this text, it becomes clear that the narrator's actions, benevolent though they may at times be, are inevitably doomed to fail Bartleby given his situation in a society which values medical categorization and definition of human individuality rather than accepting and upholding the value of difference, indeterminacy, and inscrutability. Instead of embracing Bartleby's difference or attempting to understand Bartleby on his own terms,