Ralph Savarese

Grinnell College · Department of English

This conversation began at MLA in 2012 when we recognized that cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies, two rapidly and independently developing fields, must start talking to one another. The subject is autism: how it has been divergently understood and deployed and how it can be convergently understood and deployed. Kept apart, t...

Much has been made of the plethora of disabled characters in The Confidence-Man, Melville's novel of distrust. In a special issue of Leviathan devoted to the subject of disability, Ellen Samuels teases out the relationship between deception and charity in an increasingly cosmopolitan America. The Christian injunction to be charitable, already under...

That two literary scholars, at roughly the same moment, would each pursue in Melville's work a passing allusion to Caspar Hauser seems uncanny. And yet, my interest in this figure was, as Marxists like to say, overdetermined. As the adoptive father of a nonspeaking young man with autism—by some accounts, the first ever to be admitted to a highly se...

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 Quarterly, the sensorimotor hypothesis has garnered even more support (Donnellan et al., 2010). For example, a meta-anal...

She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I'd gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I'd submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn't pray. The monk was me, and the poem, of course...

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...

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...

I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees . . . and I felt like I was in heaven. If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going....

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 no...

I sat down with celebrated author Stephen Kuusisto in the fall of 2008 in Iowa City, Iowa where he lives. I had read his first book of poems, Only Bread, Only Light, and his two memoirs, the hugely popular Planet of the Blind and the recently released Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. I had also read his completed new manuscript o...

1. The author wishes to thank David Blake, Sheila King, David Leverenz, Maureen McEvoy, John Murchek, Robert Ray, Stephanie Smith, and Emily Thornton Savarese for their help with this essay. 2. As qtd. in Andrew Combe, The Physiology of Digestion, 7th ed. (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1847), p. 26. Hereafter cited as Combe. 3. Herman Melville,...

This article offers a reading of the gay, disabled, and Jewish writer Kenny Fries' Body, Remember in the context of the recent backlash against memoir. It seeks to demonstrate the extent to which the phenomenon of recovered memory operates, for both opponents and proponents of memoir, as a kind of defining trope. It explores the implications of und...