The secret life of stories : from Don Quixote to Harry Potter, how understanding intellectual disability transforms the way we read / Michael B�erub�e.

By:

B�erub�e, Michael, 1961- [author.]

Material type: Text

TextPublisher: New York : New York University Press, [2016]Copyright date: �2016Description: 1 online resource (xiii, 223 pages)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9781479874859
147987485X

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Electronic books.

Additional physical formats: Print version:: Secret life of stories.DDC classification:

808.3 23

LOC classification:

PN3383.N35 B48 2016eb

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Contents:

Motive -- Time -- Self-awareness.

Summary: 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 B�erub�e 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, B�erub�e 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, B�erub�e 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 B�erub�e 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.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

Motive -- Time -- Self-awareness.

Print version record.

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 B�erub�e 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, B�erub�e 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, B�erub�e 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 B�erub�e 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.

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