Ralph James Savarese's Books

See It Feelingly

Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor

By: Ralph James Savarese

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See It Feelingly

Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor

By: Ralph James Savarese

“We each have Skype accounts and use them to discuss [Moby-Dick] face to face. Once a week, we spread the worded whale out in front of us; we dissect its head, eyes, and bones, careful not to hurt or kill it. The Professor and I are not whale hunters. We are not letting the whale die. We are shaping it, letting it swim through the Web with a new and polished look.”—Tito Mukhopadhyay Since the 1940s researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people's limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature. In See It Feelingly Ralph James Savarese, an English professor whose son is one of the first nonspeaking autistics to graduate from college, challenges this view. Discussing fictional works over a period of years with readers from across the autism spectrum, Savarese was stunned by the readers' ability to expand his understanding of texts he knew intimately. Their startling insights emerged not only from the way their different bodies and brains lined up with a story but also from their experiences of stigma and exclusion. For Mukhopadhyay Moby-Dick is an allegory of revenge against autism, the frantic quest for a cure. The white whale represents the autist's baffling, because wordless, immersion in the sensory. Computer programmer and cyberpunk author Dora Raymaker skewers the empathetic failings of the bounty hunters in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Autistics, some studies suggest, offer instruction in embracing the nonhuman. Encountering a short story about a lonely marine biologist in Antarctica, Temple Grandin remembers her past with an uncharacteristic emotional intensity, and she reminds the reader of the myriad ways in which people can relate to fiction. Why must there be a norm? Mixing memoir with current research in autism and cognitive literary studies, Savarese celebrates how literature springs to life through the contrasting responses of unique individuals, while helping people both on and off the spectrum to engage more richly with the world.

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Page Count

194

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478002735

ISBN 13

9781478002734

See It Feelingly

Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor

By: Ralph James Savarese

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See It Feelingly

Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor

By: Ralph James Savarese

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

194

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478002735

ISBN 13

9781478002734

Reasonable People

A Memoir of Autism and Adoption

By: Ralph James Savarese

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Reasonable People

A Memoir of Autism and Adoption

By: Ralph James Savarese

Watch an interview with DJ on CNN Listen to Ralph Savarese's interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" Visit the book's website: www.reasonable-people.com "Why would someone adopt a badly abused, nonspeaking, six-year-old from foster care?" So the author was asked at the outset of his adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. Part love story, part political manifesto about "living with conviction in a cynical time," the memoir traces the development of DJ, a boy written off as profoundly retarded and now, six years later, earning all "A's" at a regular school. Neither a typical saga of autism nor simply a challenge to expert opinion, Reasonable People illuminates the belated emergence of a self in language. And it does so using DJ's own words, expressed through the once discredited but now resurgent technique of facilitated communication. In this emotional page-turner, DJ reconnects with the sister from whom he was separated, begins to type independently, and explores his experience of disability, poverty, abandonment, and sexual abuse. "Try to remember my life," he says on his talking computer, and remember he does in the most extraordinarily perceptive and lyrical way. Asking difficult questions about the nature of family, the demise of social obligation, and the meaning of neurological difference, Savarese argues for a reasonable commitment to human possibility and caring.

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Page Count

538

Publisher

Other Press, LLC

Published Date

ISBN 10

1635421446

ISBN 13

9781635421446

Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, Or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?

A Primitivist Phenomenology

By: Pilar Martinez Benedi,Ralph James Savarese

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Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, Or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?

A Primitivist Phenomenology

By: Pilar Martinez Benedi,Ralph James Savarese

Focusing on the difference between lower-level perceptual processes in the “neural unconscious” and higher-order thought in the frontal lobes, this open access book shows how Herman Melville sought to reclaim the fluid world of the sensory, with its precategorical and radically egalitarian impulses. By studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville's work, this book offers an essential corrective to the “pathology paradigm,” which demonizes departures from a neurological norm and feasts on pejorative categorization. The neurodiversity movement arose precisely as a response to how so-called “mental disorders” have been described, understood, and treated. Unlike standard neuroscientific or psychiatric investigation, Melville's work doesn't strive to explain typical functioning through the negative and, in the process, to shore up a regime of normalcy. To the contrary, it exploits the lack of congealed diagnoses in the 19th Century, much more neutrally asking the question: what can an atypical body-mind do? Steeped in current studies about autism, Alzheimer's, Capgras and Fregoli syndromes, Mirror-touch synesthesia, phantom limb syndrome, stuttering, and tinnitus, and fully conversant with Melville scholarship, Phenomenological Primitives demonstrates what the humanities can contribute to the sciences and what the sciences can contribute to the humanities. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded in part by Grinnell College.

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Page Count

201

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1350360864

ISBN 13

9781350360860

Book's by Ralph James Savarese

See It Feelingly

See It Feelingly

See It Feelingly

See It Feelingly

Reasonable People

Reasonable People

Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, Or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?

Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, Or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?

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