Free Downloads The Secret Life Of Stories: From Don Quixote To Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms The Way We Read
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.
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: NYU Press (February 2, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1479823619
ISBN-13: 978-1479823611
Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #227,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #173 in Books > Education & Teaching > Schools & Teaching > Special Education > Learning Disabled #279 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Books & Reading > General #578 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Regional & Cultural > United States
One of the rewards of committing to read and review two or three new nonfiction books a week is that it forces me to expand my range. There is a continual flow of books I would not normally consider buying or reading. Whole categories of them. But my reading has led to all kinds of discoveries for me, and some of them light a fire for more. Here for example is a totally engaging book that demonstrates the very real power of the disabled (both physically and intellectually), both as characters in fiction and in their appreciation and interpretation of it. It’s an approach that has its own universe of scholarship, and this particular book is an intriguing eye opener of an introduction to its massive scope.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.
The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The Illustrated Edition (Harry Potter, Book 2) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: The Illustrated Edition (Harry Potter, Book 1) Harry Potter: Cinematic Guide Collection (Harry Potter) Harry Potter und die Kammer des Schreckens (Harry Potter, #2) (German Edition) Harry Potter: The Creature Vault: The Creatures and Plants of the Harry Potter Films Harry Potter et le Prisonnier d'Azkaban (French Audio CD (2 MP3 Compact Discs) Edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) (French Edition) Harry Potter und die Kammer des Schreckens (German Audio CD (10 Compact Discs) Edition of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets") Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz - 22 Audio Compact Discs (German audio edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) (German Edition) Harry Potter, I : Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers [Livre Audio (French Edition) Harry Potter, II : Harry Potter et la Chambre des Secrets [Livre Audio] [MP3 CD] (French Edition) Harry Potter a l'Ecole des Sorciers (French Audio CD (2 MP3 Compact Discs) Edition of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone") (French Edition) Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edición RAE / Don Quixote de la Mancha. RAE (Real Academia Espanola) (Spanish Edition) Stories of Don Quixote Written Anew for Children God and Juggernaut: Iran's Intellectual Encounter With Modernity (Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East) Random Harry Potter Facts You Probably Don't Know: (154 Fun Facts and Secret Trivia) Don Quixote of the Mancha (Everyman's Library Children's Classics) Don Quixote: Translated by Edith Grossman Don Quixote Don Quixote: A BabyLit® Spanish Language Primer (BabyLit Books)
