Melville and Neurodiversity: A Critical Cognitive Approach

(Hardback)

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Description

Focusing on Herman Melville and the ways in which his work interrogated the difference between lower-level perceptual processes (the sensory) and higher-order cognition (thought), this open access book demonstrates what the humanities may contribute to neuroscientific investigation. The neurodiversity movement arose precisely as a response to how so-called mental disorders have been described, understood, and treated. Unlike standard neuroscientific investigation, Melvilles work doesnt use departures from a neurological norm to explain typical functioning and, in the process, to shore up a regime of normalcy. To the contrary, it asks, what an atypical body-mind can do. In studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville and his work, this book offers an essential corrective to cognitive literary studies, which it argues has has uncritically accepted the pathology paradigm and redeployed it in the domain of literature.

Author Bio

Pilar Martinez Benedi is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of L'Aquila, Italy. Ralph James Savarese is Professor of English at Grinnell College, USA.