Just Published: “Neurocosmopolitan Melville.”

From Leviathan 15.2 (2013). 7-19.

PDF: Neurocosmopolitan Melville

Just published: “I Might Be Famous.”

In Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family. Ed. Joy Castro. University of Nebraska Press.

Just Published: Moving the Field: The Sensorimotor Perspective on Autism

From Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 7.6 (2013). On-line.

(Commentary on “Rethinking autism: implications of sensory and motor differences,” an article by Anne Donnellan, David Hill, and Martha Leary)

Ralph J. Savarese

Humanities Writ Large Fellow, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

This triad of clinicians and researchers has been advancing a sensorimotor perspective on autism for years; at last, the scientific community is beginning to catch up. Since the article’s initial publication in Disability Studies … Read More

Just published: “Easy Breathing Forever.”

Interview in Stuck in the Middle with You: Parenting in Three Genders. Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Just published: “From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism: Beyond Mere Acceptance and Inclusion.”

In Ethics and Neurodiversity. Ed. Alexandra Perry. (April 2013)

Forthcoming: “The Critic as Neurocosmopolite: What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese.””

Narrative 22.1 (2014).

Forthcoming: “What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry: A Neurocosmopolitan Approach.”

In Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Oxford University Press (2014).

Literate Lungs: One Autist’s Journey as a Reader

From Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities 37.2 (2012). 100-110.

Emily Thornton Savarese
Grinnell, Iowa

Ralph James Savarese
Grinnell College

This article underscores the importance of coupling a practical orientation to the many challenges of autism with a philosophical and political orientation that refuses merely to make room for disability in the classroom or to accommodate its specific needs. It uses a case study approach to illustrate the ways in which subject matter and narrative convention … Read More

Gobs and Gobs of Metaphor: Dynamic Relation and a Classical Autist’s Typed Massage

From Inflexions 5, “Simondon: Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetics” (March 2012). 184-223.

In his short commentary [2] on a “papal red” painting entitled “Birds would violate airline dapper standards for appearance but the skies sport vivider dayglo colors when it can fly freely and uncensored by mankind” (Biklen 2005: 179), autistic painter Larry Bissonnette imagines a realm of unencumbered artistic activity. “Not allowing people with disabilities their patterns of inspiring art through total freedom of expression,” he reiterates, “is like limiting creativity … Read More

“Organic Hesitancy”: On Speechlessness in Billy Budd

From Secret Sharers: Melville, Conrad and Narratives of the Real, edited by Pawel Jedrzejko, Milton M. Reigelman and Zuzanna Szatanik:

It is all the rage, in autism circles, to diagnose a particular historical or literary figure as autistic. Some scholars have even diagnosed fictional characters—Bartleby, for example—as being on the spectrum. When I began writing this chapter, I had just finished a book on autism, and I was seeing it everywhere. I knew that I wanted to analyze disability in … Read More

Toward a Postcolonial Neurology: Autism, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and a New Geo-poetics of the Body

From the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (4.3, 2010)

The article proposes the need for a postcolonial neurology, countering recent concerns about the dilution of the term postcolonial when used as metaphor. Adapting George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s notion of “philosophy in the flesh”—the fact that cognition is embodied, which is to say radically conditioned by physiological systems—it analyzes the nonfiction work of Tito Mukhopadhyay, an Indian writer in America whom the medical community would describe as “severely” … Read More

Nervous Wrecks and Ginger-nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill

From Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (October 2003; Volume 5, No. 2)

Recall the moment in Moby-Dick when Stubb proclaims, after Queequeg has been pulled from the shark-infested waters,

Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? . . . Is ginger the sort of fuel you use . . . to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? . . . The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the … Read More