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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Readdi Michael Berube
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How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of readingNarrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine. We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their “well-formedness” within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk. Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of writing then re-wired our brains. In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé tells a dramatically different tale, in a compelling account of how an understanding of intellectual disability can transform our understanding of narrative. Instead of focusing on characters with disabilities, he shows how ideas about intellectual disability inform an astonishingly wide array of narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the experience of reading. Interweaving his own stories with readings of such texts as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Bérubé puts his theory into practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role of disability studies within it.Armed only with the tools of close reading, Bérubé demonstrates the immensely generative possibilities in the ways disability is deployed within fiction, finding in them powerful meditations on what it means to be a social being, a sentient creature with an awareness of mortality and causality—and sentience itself. Persuasive and witty, Michael Bérubé engages Harry Potter fans and scholars of literature alike. For all readers, The Secret Life of Stories will fundamentally change the way we think about the way we read. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)808.3Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Rhetoric of fictionClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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The Secret Life of Stories has just three chapters: Motive, Time, and Self-Awareness. Each looks at an aspect of fiction from two angles: how a disabled character affects the work, and how a disabled reader or character sees that work. In particular, Self-Awareness is a fractal, recursive vortex of possibilities, as Bérubé examines how disabled characters do or do not, can or can not see themselves in their own narrative.
He perceives that writers use the disabled to expand literary possibilities by an order of magnitude. Normal rules don’t apply to the disabled. Relationships go off the track and don’t ever have to come to a stop. The disabled’s special powers and deep and different perceptions, free the author to go way outside the box of standard narrative. In examples from Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe to Martian Time-Slip and the cult films Galaxy Quest and Memento, mind twisting events all start with the disabled.
Bérubé has a nice, light touch. But he also has an academic’s unfortunate tendency to replace perfectly adequate English words with clinical equivalents. This slows the read while adding little value. So the book moves easily, but hits moguls all over.
Bérubé calls it “a short and sharp book, delineating a few of the most important and engaging uses of intellectual disability in fiction” and he delivers solidly. Then unaccountably, and having almost nothing to do with intellectual disability, his Conclusion bashes the literature of the field. It’s so inconsistent with the chapters, it appears to belong in some other book. It ties together nothing he has painstakingly demonstrated.
I was rather hoping he would postulate a new literary discipline born of intellectual disability, or a breakthrough insight for psychology, or new literary categories to make them stand out. But no such luck. If you leave off after the three chapters, you will be mightily impressed.
David Wineberg ( )