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Michael Bérubé

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The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read Kindle Edition

by Michael Bérubé (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 9 ratings

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How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of reading

Narrative 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Bérubé's timely and significant contributions in The Secret Life of Stories emboldens scholars of the humanities to study more deeply intellectual disability and its function in narrative."An enjoyable and thought-provoking work that will encourage continued engagement with intellectual disability" ― Disability Studies Quarterly

""An enlightening examination." ― Library Journal

"This volume is important for connecting disability studies with literary scholarship." ― Choice

"The Secret Life of Storiesis certainly a landmark text in literary studies of disability and in literary criticism more generally. It will change the way you think about disability." ― Canadian Review of Comparative Literature

"Arguing that the idea of intellectual disability has been for writers and can be for critics an extremely productive nexus for thinking through big questions about narrative and irony, The Secret Life of Storiespushes us further, brilliantly defending the arts and humanities. Bérubés mind for literary analysis is a powerhouse. This little book is a rare treat." -- Susan M. Schweik,author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public

"Michael Bérubé has long advocated for the importance of the humanities in higher education and in public culture more generally. InThe Secret Life of Stories, he puts that advocacy into practice, demonstrating to readers the multifaceted pleasures of reading. With dazzling ideas about narrative and disability, interwoven with personal stories and delightful readings of a variety of texts,The Secret Life of Storiesis a joy to read. An extraordinary book." -- Robert McRuer,author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

"[Berube has] picked out select booksthat I can imagine him either teaching or just reading for pleasure, identifying themes to explicate, and taking as much delight in the retelling of key episodes as he does in the deeper analysis." ― Los Angeles Review of Books

"Michael Bérubés son tells us that & in a story things have to happen for a reasonas fine a definition of narrative as Aristotles.That is also true of great literary criticism: it helps us understand why things happen, in literature and in life.This generous, expansive, brilliant book has deep insights for all of us. The Secret Life of Storiesis preciousfor all the right reasons." -- Cathy N. Davidson,Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of Now You See It: How the Brain Scien

"Michael Berube'sThe Secret Life of Storiesis that rare book that manages to speak to its specialized academic audience while imagining and addressing a much broader readership. Berube...has crafted an accessible, if still rigorous, study of the way fiction grapples with intellectual disability." ― Slant Magazine

"[A] concise, fresh, and deeply informed look at how we read." ― STARRED Kirkus Reviews

"The Secret Life of Stories...gives a reader the feeling of sitting in an engaging seminar with a witty, candid, and empathetic leader. It reviews literary disability studies in a way comprehensible to those new to the field, even as it invigorates and extends that thinking for current disability studiesscholars....Bérubé offers therefore just the right voice to model ideas that make the case for disability as both a matter of social justice and of artistic innovation, marking the maturity of the field even as it works to move it in new directions." ― College Literature

About the Author

Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. In 2012, he served as the President of the Modern Language Association. He is the author of several books, including Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (NYU Press, 1997), The Left at War (NYU Press, 2009), What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias” in Higher Education (2006), and Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996).

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B010VIKSAM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYU Press; Reprint edition (June 17, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 17, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 720 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 237 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,145,592 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #181 in Special Education eBooks on Learning Disabilities
- #475 in United States Literary Criticism
- #518 in Books & Reading Literary Criticism

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4.1 9 ratings

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Michael Bérubé

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Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of twelve books to date, including Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996; paper, Vintage, 1998); and What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006). He has also published two edited collections, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge, 1995; with Cary Nelson) and The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2005).

Life as We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year (on a list of seven) by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio.

In 2015 he published The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, co-authored with Jennifer Ruth (Palgrave). His ninth book, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read, was published by NYU Press in early 2016; in October 2016, Beacon Press published Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up, which was written with extensive input from Jamie himself. In 2021, the Norton Library (a new series from W. W. Norton) published his edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (the 1818 text).

In 2022, Johns Hopkins University Press published his second collaboration with Jennifer Ruth, It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, a provocative book that asks whether academic freedom--as distinct from free speech--should extend to white supremacists, or whether we should treat advocates of racist pseudoscience the way we treat believers in phlogiston or the efficacy of human sacrifice.

In 2024, Columbia University Press published his most recent book, The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species.

He served three terms on the American Association of University Professors' Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2009 to 2018, two terms on the AAUP National Council from 2005 to 2011, and two terms on the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes from 2011 to 2017. In 2012 he was president of the Modern Language Association. From 2010 to 2017, he served as the Director of Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. From 2012 to 2020, he served on the University Faculty Senate, and was elected Chair for the 2018-19 academic year.