Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?
Subtitle: A Primitivist Phenomenology
By: Pilar Martinez Benedi and Ralph James Savarese
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Explorations in Science and Literature
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2024
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9781350360891; 9781350360860; 9781350360877; 9781350360884; 9781350360907
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Neurodiversity; Phenomenology; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900; Literary studies: fiction;novelists & prose writers
Description: Focusing on the difference between lower-level perceptual processes in the "neural unconscious" and higher-order thought in the frontal lobes, this open access book shows how Herman Melville sought to reclaim the fluid world of the sensory, with its precategorical and radically egalitarian impulses. By studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville's work, this book offers an essential corrective to the "pathology paradigm," which demonizes departures from a neurological norm and feasts on pejorative categorization.    The neurodiversity movement arose precisely as a response to how so-called "mental disorders" have been described, understood, and treated. Unlike standard neuroscientific or psychiatric investigation, Melville's work doesn't strive to explain typical functioning through the negative and, in the process, to shore up a regime of normalcy. To the contrary, it exploits the lack of congealed diagnoses in the 19th Century, much more neutrally asking the question: what can an atypical body-mind do?     Steeped in current studies about autism, Alzheimer's, Capgras and Fregoli syndromes, Mirror-touch synesthesia, phantom limb syndrome, stuttering, and tinnitus, and fully conversant with Melville scholarship, Phenomenological Primitives demonstrates what the humanities can contribute to the sciences and what the sciences can contribute to the humanities.  The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded in part by Grinnell University.
Notes: Open Access Unrestricted online access

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Table of contents: title: Introduction: Far Borders                                                                                                    Chapter 1.  Hard of Meaning                                                                                                         Chapter 2.  Phantom Empathy: Ahab, Race, and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia                             Chapter 3.  "First Principles": Animism in Pierre                                                                                 Chapter 4.  Billy Fo(u)wl: Stuttering and the Perverse Triumph of the Perceptual                              Afterword: I and My Neurological Difference                                                      Acknowledgments                                                                                                                                                                                                     Index                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Bibliography