On his book See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor
Cover Interview of March 13, 2019
The wide angle
I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It
roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver
Sacks famous. In the preface to one of his books, he speaks of acting “in part
like a naturalist, examining rare forms of life; in part like an
anthropologist, a neuroanthropologist, in the field.” The neurologically
disabled, according to this trope, are like an exotic form of butterfly or a
tribe of people that hasn’t yet encountered “civilized” people. With Sacks, the
medical case study becomes, as he puts it, a “paradoxical tale” of enabling
disability. In See It Feelingly, I, too, offer a series of profiles, but
I entirely dispense with what Sacks couldn’t quite shake off: namely, the
tyranny of norms and the need to pathologize neurological difference. How did I
come to this subject? Twenty years ago, I adopted from foster care a badly
abused, nonspeaking, six-year-old boy with autism—he was said to be “profoundly
retarded.” Two years ago this May, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin
College as its first nonspeaking student with autism. And last year, he won a
prestigious Peabody Award for the documentary Deej, which follows his
inclusion journey and which he co-produced, starred in, and wrote. This experience was obviously transformative for me
as a person and writer. Luckily, the field of disability studies had begun to
gather traction around the time that I adopted my son. I now had an
interdisciplinary field in which to insert my work. The field distinguished
between “impairment,” a physiological condition, and “disability,” a social
construction. The latter occurs when the built environment and prejudicial
attitudes conspire to not only exclude, but also to demean, people very different
from ourselves.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks famous. In the preface to one of his books, he speaks of acting “in part like a naturalist, examining rare forms of life; in part like an anthropologist, a neuroanthropologist, in the field.” The neurologically disabled, according to this trope, are like an exotic form of butterfly or a tribe of people that hasn’t yet encountered “civilized” people. With Sacks, the medical case study becomes, as he puts it, a “paradoxical tale” of enabling disability. In See It Feelingly, I, too, offer a series of profiles, but I entirely dispense with what Sacks couldn’t quite shake off: namely, the tyranny of norms and the need to pathologize neurological difference. How did I come to this subject? Twenty years ago, I adopted from foster care a badly abused, nonspeaking, six-year-old boy with autism—he was said to be “profoundly retarded.” Two years ago this May, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College as its first nonspeaking student with autism. And last year, he won a prestigious Peabody Award for the documentary Deej, which follows his inclusion journey and which he co-produced, starred in, and wrote. This experience was obviously transformative for me as a person and writer. Luckily, the field of disability studies had begun to gather traction around the time that I adopted my son. I now had an interdisciplinary field in which to insert my work. The field distinguished between “impairment,” a physiological condition, and “disability,” a social construction. The latter occurs when the built environment and prejudicial attitudes conspire to not only exclude, but also to demean, people very different from ourselves.