The Hunchback Of Notre Dame Analysis

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Norden, Martin. “You’re a Surprise from Every Angle: Disability, Identity, and Otherness in The Hunchback of Notre Dame” Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability. Cheu, Johnson, ed. McFarland, 2013. Print.
In this article, Martin Norden examines the representations of Quasimodo portrayed in the Disney animated movie, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. His main claim is that instead of improving social acceptance towards disabilities as indicated by the filmmakers, the film in fact reinforces the attitudinal barrier which excludes disabled people from the communities. He illustrates his main claim by focusing on the identity issues which inform the Quasimodo character and the way that the producers …show more content…

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1977 with a major of Radio-TV-Film. His study focuses on the film representation of people with physical disabilities, the film construction of evil, selected Disney films and so on. So Norden can be considered as a credible writer. This article is peer-reviewed by Johnson Cheu, who is a professor of writing as well as rhetoric and American culture at Michigan State University. The McFarland Company is a publisher for academic books. It had published 5000 titles by 2011. The editor and publisher both add credibility to this article. Norden’s propose in writing this article is likely to add discussion to the Social model of disability studies, which is the social and cultural construction of individual’s disabled status. His intended audience is the scholars who also do research in the related fields and the producers who are responsible for portrayals of disabled characters, since he tries to call attention to improve the long-existing discrimination towards disabilities. However, since most of Norden’s studies focus on the representation of disabled characters in films or on TV, his analysis might lacks of practical applications in realistic world. Another bias is that he mainly discusses how the filmmakers conflict with themselves in creating the figure of Quasimodo, but he doesn’t combine his discussion with sufficient evidence in the

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