{"product_id":"the-secret-life-of-stories-9781479832736","title":"The Secret Life of Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of reading\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNarrative 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.            \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Secret Life of Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Sound and the Fury\u003c\/i\u003e, Haddon’s \u003ci\u003eThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time\u003c\/i\u003e, Kingston’s \u003ci\u003eThe Woman Warrior\u003c\/i\u003e, and Philip K. Dick’s \u003ci\u003eMartian Time-Slip\u003c\/i\u003e, Bérubé puts his theory into practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role of disability studies within it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArmed 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Secret Life of Stories\u003c\/i\u003e will fundamentally change the way we think about the way we read.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Michael Bérubé","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48274274189563,"sku":"9781479832736","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/CoreSourceHub_fd979938-3367-4d47-b3be-3f00e365796a.jpg?v=1777695420","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/the-secret-life-of-stories-9781479832736","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}