Secret Life of Stories

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.

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, 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., 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., 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., "An enlightening examination.

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).