Many thanks to Phyllis Eisenson Anderson, Christopher Robinson, and Susan Squier for reading this book in manuscript almost as soon as it was written; thanks also to Chris Castiglia, Chris Reed, and Anne McCarthy, dear colleagues at Penn State, for reading the “Motive” chapter as part of our collaborative writing group. A special thanks to Richard Powers, for reading the manuscript with painstaking care and for not minding my line about Western Union in my brief discussion of his 2006 novel The Echo Maker. My colleagues in disability studies have been discussing bits and pieces of this book as I have stitched them together over the years, and I need especially to thank hosts and interlocutors at the University of Missouri, Syracuse University, the University of Louisville, George Washington University, Loyola University of Chicago, Duquesne University, Yale University, and the University of Virginia for allowing me to test these ideas in public forums. Closer to home, I want to thank the wonderful students of my spring 2013 graduate seminar and fall 2013 senior seminar at Penn State for working with me on some of the novels discussed in this book. Students who contributed key insights are individually thanked in the notes.
I owe a special debt to Amanda Anderson and the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University—and to my participants in the summer 2013 seminar, “Narrative, Intellectual Disability and the Boundaries of the Human.” People who have been through SCT’s six-week summer program often describe it as a transformative intellectual experience, and now I know why. It was the most rigorous and rewarding six weeks of my professional life. I want to thank all my seminar participants for putting up with the examples of “evocriticism” I asked them to read, which exasperated some of them no end; more substantially, I want to thank Sandra Danilovic, Andrew Ferguson, Leon Hilton, Brandon Jones, Péter Makai, Kate Noson, David Oswald, Conor Pitetti, Michael Sawyer, and Jess Waggoner for sustained exchanges that continue to this day. My fellow seminar leaders, Ian Baucom, Jane Bennett, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, were whip-smart and relentlessly witty, and the marathon one-hour question/answer periods after every lecture, combined with the two-hour dissection of each seminar leader’s work, are things I will remember for as long as I have memories. Presiding over it all, Amanda Anderson was brilliant and gracious—as usual.
Portions of this book have been previously published in PMLA, American Scientist, the Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies, and the Common Review.
This is the first scholarly book whose contents I have discussed not only with my older son, Nicholas, but also with my younger son, Jamie. Jamie is aware that he has a disability, and he has been to many of my lectures and a few of my classes on disability studies (after one of which, on the history of deafness, he asked, “Am I deaf?”—thinking, as he explained, of all the audiology exams he underwent as a child). But he is even more keenly aware of disability in the world around him, and now peppers me with questions as to which characters in literature and film can plausibly be said to have disabilities. Thank you, Jamie, for being such an observant and inquisitive young man, and thank you, Nick, for being such a perspicacious and quick-witted old man. And Janet Lyon, who shaped these ideas during every waking moment of our lives together, and possibly through much mumbling in our sleep as well: thank you for all your amazing work on literature and disability. You know your book will leave no aspect of modernist studies untouched.
My mother, Anne Clarke Bérubé, makes a brief appearance in the introduction; this book is dedicated to her memory. Here, I just want to thank her and my father, Maurice Ralph Bérubé, for helping me learn how to read and write.
State College, Pennsylvania