Curious Incident Of The Dog Research Articles

Novelistic Ruins: Textual Fragmentation and Contemporary British Literature

A esperanca, a imagem e a resposta utopicas discutidas por Terry Eagleton e Georg Lukacs se tornam evidentes nos romances elencados neste artigo ( Atonement de Ian McEwan, The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time de Mark Haddon, Bring up the Bodies de Hilary Mantel e White Teeth de Zadie Smith) na maneira que os conflitos sao, se nao resolvidos, pelo menos revestidos de uma aparencia insolita nas coisas e objetos inventariados em listas. O que eu proponho neste artigo e pensar como as listas dos referidos romances participam na ruptura da linguagem, no colapso da narrativa, no confronto de perspectivas, na fragilidade do valor e na vacuidade de sentido. Os romances contemporâneos tendem a nos dar um tipo de atalho na percepcao por meio do uso de listas, enumeracoes e inventarios, os quais suspendem a linguagem, a narrativa, a subjetividade, o valor e o sentido, em sua confusa voracidade e infinidade. Palavras-chave : Listas. Utopia. Ruinas. ABSTRACT The article discusses both the textual fragmentation and the utopian space of literary lists in Ian McEwan’s Atonement , Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time , Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by following the lead of Terry Eagleton and Georg Lukacs. It is my contention that the utopian hope, image, and response created in contemporary novels are evident in the way contradictions acquire a poetic veneer in the things and objects inventoried on lists. It is to the aid of an ars disjunctoria that the postmodernist novelists have returned and this return spells out as the utopian hope towards, image of, and response to, the willingness to allow the newly released parts of narrative to float, mingle, and monumentalize themselves as ruins. This utopian space created with the help of lists in contemporary novels has to do with the relative failure of formal realism and with the hardening of the conclusion, reached by Eagleton and Lukacs, that to narrate is itself a moral act. The article also discusses the extent to which the lists in the said novels participate in the overall break-up of language, in the collapse of narrative, in the clash of subjective standpoints, in the fragility of value, in the elusiveness of meaning, and in the creation of a “ruinous” present. The conclusion points to how contemporary novels tend to give us a kind of foreshortening of perception through the use of lists, enumerations, and inventories which suspend language, narrative, subjectivity, value, and meaning in their dizzying voraciousness and infinity. Keywords: Lists. Utopia. Contemporary Ruins.

Neurodiverse Self-Discovery and Social Acceptance in Curious Incident and Marcelo in the Real World

The article compares the identities and coming-of-age experiences of neurodiverse young adult protagonists in two novels, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Francis...

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability eds. by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability eds. by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray Clare Mullaney BARKER, CLARE, and STUART MURRAY, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 254 pp. $84.99 hardcover; $21.75 paperback; $14.60 Kindle. The Cambridge Companion to Disability and Literature, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, offers a much-needed introduction to the thriving field of literary disability studies, which emerged as an academic discipline in the late 1990s following its origins in the social sciences. Each of the volume's carefully crafted essays will appeal to a broad audience, benefiting both undergraduate students and advanced literary scholars looking for a comprehensive primer to disability studies and, more specifically, representations of disability in literature. In their introduction to the Companion, Clare Barker and Stuart Murray suggest that the problem with disability is not that it is absent from literature but "that it is frequently not seen" (2). They continue, "That this is the case is.…less to do with the texts themselves than the reading practices that have been brought to them. Precisely because disability appears to signal the possibility of so many connections to other topics, it can easily be lost or subsumed in what are presumed to be more 'important' (and nearly always nondisabled) questions" (2). Literary scholars are trained to understand disability as symbolic; "actual disabilities seem clearly less important than the function they serve to underscore," whether it be sentiment, abjection, villainy, or heroism. Each of the Companion's essays models how to read for disability as what Ellen Samuels calls "actual realities" and considers how representations of the lived, material experience of impairment challenge conventional literary forms and their accompanying modes of analysis (qtd. in Companion 10). The Companion is divided into two parts. The book's first half features eight essays, which track a historical genealogy of disability representations, moving chronologically from medieval to contemporary literature. Edward Wheatly suggests that medieval writing illustrates what he calls the "religious model of disability" whereby impairment is a result of "divine punishment for sinful behavior" and cure was understood as religious rather than medical (18, 19). Alison Hobgood and David Wood turn to early modern humoral theory to show how an anonymous Renaissance play, Looke about You, casts emotional deviance as a productive and even desirable aesthetic. Like Hobgood and Wood, Essaka Joshua suggests that "deformity" in the eighteenth century was, as in Frances Burney's Camilla (1796), an affirmative, aesthetic category that predates "disability" (47). Despite the rise of medicalization in the nineteenth century, Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that stereotypical representations of "afflicted" and "defective" characters like Charles Dickens's tragic Tiny Tim are ripe [End Page 299] for understanding disability as a social category because they are positioned in relation to kinship and labor. Michael Davidson asserts that modernist literature predominantly "feature[s] disease or disability as a figure for social upheavals and cultural malaise" to buffer ideals of "the statistically normal body" (74, 85). While we might assume that contemporary literature offers more nuanced representations of disability, Stuart Murray posits that post-1945 novels waffle between problematic depictions of impairment as sentimental and melodramatic, and subversions of these stereotypical representations in narratives like Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In her essay on postcolonial fiction, Barker discusses how representations of "affliction" and their association with muteness are "direct consequences of colonization," and, although they rely on metaphor, she suggests that they also trouble "widely accepted ideas about the body, health, ability, and healing" (105, 111). The second section of the Companion considers disability studies' critical methodological investments and their overlap with intersecting minority fields of study. Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim's essay on disability and intersectionality turns to Audre Lorde's work in the 1980s to advocate for neither the inclusion nor the replacement of "disability" among a range of other identities but for consideration of intersecting "systems and structures of oppression" (129). Looking specifically at the overlap between crip and queer identities, Robert McRuer examines a range of literary, visual, and cultural...

ТЕМА РОДИТЕЛЬСТВА В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ПОДРОСТКОВОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЯ М. ХЭДДОНА «ЗАГАДОЧНОЕ НОЧНОЕ УБИЙСТВО СОБАКИ»)

The article is devoted to the theme of parenthood in modern teenage literature. The authors, examining the problem of the relationship between parents and children by the example of Mark Haddon’s novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, prove that in families with special children the degree of responsibility of adults is higher, since it involves a number of psychological and social problems that go beyond family relationships. The reference to M. Haddon helps not only to see the life of children with developmental features in a new way, but also to understand what difficulties their parents have to overcome, how much they are willing to change and accept the situation.

The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé Maren Linett Michael Bérubé. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York UP, 2016. xiii + 223 pp. Michael Bérubé's prose is a pleasure to read. Whether he is describing conversations with his sons about the nature of stories, laying out the intricate plot details of Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, or explaining Peter Brooks's and Roland Barthes's elaborations of narrative codes, his tone and diction are straightforward, engaging, and witty. The Secret Life of Stories is a treat: an enjoyable and illuminating discussion of a wide range of literary and cinematic works as they are informed—often directly formed—by the presence of mental disability. As Bérubé argues, "narrative deployments of disability do not confine themselves to representation. They can also be narrative strategies, devices for exploring vast domains of human thought, experience, and action" (2). Rather than delineating how disabilities are represented in the texts he considers, then, Bérubé explores how disability as a textual element affects or interacts with other textual elements such as narrative motive, temporality, and self-consciousness (his chapters are entitled "Motive," "Time," and "Self-Awareness"). This approach results in valuable readings of texts ranging from the difficult (The Sound and the Fury, Life and Times of Michael K) to the popular (Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) to the downright weird (Martian Time-Slip). One of Bérubé's goals in his exploration of how intellectual disability interacts with narrative is to "get at the question of how narrative irony works when it involves a character with an intellectual disability, a character who is rendered explicitly as someone who is incapable of understanding the story he or she inhabits" (13). This focus on narrative irony leads him to engage with reader-response theory and Russian formalist notions of defamiliarization as he demonstrates that intellectual disability plays an active role in authors' constructions of their narratives and of the imagined social worlds in which those narratives take place. In his reading of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Bérubé deftly discusses Benjamin Compson's sense of time and how it bends, or "derange[s]," "ordinary protocols of narrative temporality" (83). By exploring particular passages in Benjy's section of the novel, Bérubé is able to show how misguided (and ableist) it is to see Benjy as childlike, as the other characters in the novel and most critics do. [End Page 371] He is an intellectually impaired adult, even though his intellectual impairment is completely fictional; and as Bérubé compellingly points out, he shares his brothers' concern about the family honor and about "female sexuality in general" (81). This reading expands our understanding of Benjy's obsession with his sister Caddy. It is not just that she was the only family member to care about him, but also that Benjy too has been interpellated by "the standard old-Southern ideologies of gender and race" (80). This, in turn, changes our view of the role of Caddy's sexuality in the novel as a whole: realizing that Benjy is an "interested party" (81) rather than an innocent grants us a much-needed critical distance from the text's "pathologization of her sexuality." Bérubé's similarly engaging discussion of J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K reads Michael's blankness, or storylessness, as involving the text in paradoxical maneuvers, narrating while "approach[ing] the condition of nonnarative" (67). Noting Michael's occasional adoption of "strategic mindblindness"—a variety of what Tobin Siebers has called disability masquerade, though Bérubé doesn't mention Siebers in this context—Bérubé explores the role Michael plays in controlling how other characters respond to him. His intellectual disability "becomes the impetus not only for the narrative of his life, and of every character's interaction with him, but also for all interpretive procedures brought to bear...

A cognitive pragmatic approach to punctuation

A cognitive pragmatic approach to punctuation

The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé Ann Fox Bérubé, Michael. 2016. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press. $24.95 hc. xiii + 223 pp. The Secret Life of Stories is a short, elegantly written monograph that gives a reader the feeling of sitting in an engaging seminar with a witty, candid, and empathetic leader. It reviews literary disability studies in a way comprehensible to those new to the field, even as it invigorates and extends that thinking for current disability studies scholars. Readers familiar with disability studies will find the book’s opening contention familiar—that “representations of disability are ubiquitous, far more prevalent and pervasive than (almost) anybody realizes” (1). But Michael Bérubé contends that disability studies has gone somewhat adrift even as it revels in this ubiquity. His book reminds us that the current critical emphases on assessing kind or accuracy of literary depictions of disability can threaten to inhibit the more innovative interpretive possibilities that disability studies offers. As he points out, the field need not be “confined to the representation of human bodies and minds in literary texts” (25). Taking up his own methodological challenge, Bérubé offers in his work a different take on what he calls the “deployments” of disability in narrative, arguing that “they can also be narrative strategies, devices for exploring vast domains of human thought, experience, [End Page 116] and action” (2). Bérubé argues, in particular, that the deployment of intellectual disability provides the opportunity for a more capacious understanding of how narratives work. For example, Benjy’s intellectual disability in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury can invite a re-imagination of how narratives are “supposed” to unfold; Christopher’s hyper-intricate descriptions of the world around him in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time can expose the constructedness of (neuro)typical narration. In building upon similar work of other literary disability studies scholars, Bérubé also offers in this book a thoughtful interrogation of some of their foundational ideas, such as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s “narrative prosthesis” and Ato Quayson’s “aesthetic nervousness.” In their ever-expanding body of work, Bérubé contends, scholars can unwittingly undermine their own political ends and limit an understanding of what disability can do for stories, by diagnosing and cataloguing disabled characters, as well as emphasizing physical but not intellectual disability. Bérubé further asserts that critical interventions must not simply define disability as the literal depiction of an identity always fated to be contained, erased, or dismissed. Instead, Bérubé aligns himself with and builds upon the approaches of scholars such as Tobin Siebers (visual studies) and Joseph Straus (musicology). Like them, he uses this book to claim aesthetic weight and legitimacy for disability in art. His approach eschews supplying an exhaustive (and exhausting) catalogue of examples, instead emphasizing through its case studies disability’s narrative possibilities. In this sense, The Secret Life of Stories is an important addition to other work that has shown disability to be a generative force in artistic, social, and cultural creation. I am thinking here, for example, of H-Dirksen Bauman’s notion of “Deaf gain” and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of “disability gain,” both of which emphasize that there is a collective knowledge all readers (not just those in disability studies) can acquire from disability experiences. Framing his work with engaging stories from his life as a scholar, teacher, and father of an intellectually disabled son, Bérubé moves thoughtfully and purposefully through a wide range of texts, popular and canonical, traditional and experimental. His broad historical scope helps him delineate “a few of the most important and engaging uses of intellectual disability in fiction” through his shorter case studies (31). In particular, he focuses on the ways in which intellectual disability becomes a transformative element in narrative in delineating motive, time, and self-awareness anew. For example, he [End Page...

Experience, Research, and Writing: Octavia E. Butler as an Author of Disability Literature

Experience, Research, and WritingOctavia E. Butler as an Author of Disability Literature Sami Schalk (bio) In a journal entry on November 12, 1973, Octavia E. Butler writes: "I should stay healthy! The bother and worry of being sick and not being able to afford to do anything but complain about the pain and hope it goes away is Not conducive to good (or prolific) writing."1 At this time, at the age of twenty-six, Butler had not yet sold her first novel. She was just on the cusp of what would be an incredible writing career, starting with her first novel, Patternmaster, published a mere three years later. But in 1973, Butler was an essentially unknown and struggling writer who regularly battled poverty, health, and her own harsh inner critic. From the outset of her career, Butler's texts have been lauded, critiqued, and read again and again in relationship to race, gender, and sexuality. Only recently, however, has her work been taken up in respect to disability.2 Therí A. Pickens argues,"Situating disability at or near the center of Butler's work (alongside race and gender) lays bare how attention to these categories of analysis shifts the conversation about the content of Butler's work."3 Building upon Pickens and other recent work on Butler and disability, I seek to change conversations about Butler's work among feminist, race, and genre studies scholars while also encouraging more attention to Butler by disability studies scholars. In this article, I use evidence from Butler's personal papers, public interviews, and publications to position Butler as an author of disability literature due to her lived experiences, her research, and her writing. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that understands disability and ability as socially constructed concepts that vary by time, location, and culture. Within disability studies, literary critics have begun to shape an informal canon [End Page 153] of disability literature.4 By canon I mean that certain texts appear regularly in literary disability studies scholarship and postsecondary courses. While these texts range in publication dates and author gender identities, they are overwhelminginly white, British, and American in terms of author identity and content. Although the whiteness of disability studies has been critiqued5 and there has been increased attention to work by writers of color, there is still much work to be done. More scholarship on writers of color in literary disability studies will both expand and complicate our knowledge and expectations of disability literature. Within this generally white informal canon of disability literature, some common texts include Richard III, Jane Eyre, The Sound and the Fury, and Of Mice and Men. These texts are considered part of disability literature because of the presence of major disabled characters and the texts' existing place in other more established canons. More contemporary books representing disability, such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Call Me Ahab, and Exile and Pride, have become staples of literary disability studies because of their mainstream popularity and/or the fact that the text was written by a disabled person about living with a disability. No disability studies scholar has attempted to officially define or delimit disability literature, let alone its canon. However, the much-discussed nature of some of the texts mentioned above certainly suggests two key parameters for understanding what constitutes disability literature today: the representation of a character, ideally a major character, with a disability, and an author who has a disability or who has some particular knowledge of disability rights, culture, and experiences. This is reflected in the "About Us" section for Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature that describes the journal as: [A]n online quarterly journal of disability poetry, literature and art dedicated to providing a venue where the new work of writers with disabilities can be found and to building up a corpus of work for those interested in disability literature. While it gives preference to the work of writers with disability, it seeks the well-crafted work of any writer that makes a contribution of the field.6 Wordgathering's statement here represents the...

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

“The World Loves an Underdog,” or the Continuing Appeal of the Adolescent Rebel Narrative: A Comparative Reading of Vernon God Little, The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn

The early reception of D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003) has been characterized by comparisons with two canonical literary antecedents: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and, at a greater remove, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The three novels capitalize on the subversive potential of disaffected teenage narrators, whose compelling vernacular voices, and distinctive position as outsiders in the adult world, are powerful tools for social critique. This article offers an analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in the narrative tradition that links Vernon Little to Huckleberry Finn via the pivotal figure of Holden Caulfield, who is widely considered as the original, unsurpassed model of adolescent rebelliousness in modern literature. Grounded in an extensive exploration of the history of reception of the three texts, this study proceeds to highlight and explore the wider implications of Pierre’s provocative twist on his predecessors’ narrative template. Significantly, this deliberate departure is overlooked in most reviews of Vernon God Little – an omission which testifies to our deep investment in the idea of teenagers as liminal figures between childhood and adulthood, and thus still relatively untainted by worldly corruption. Paradoxically, the persistence of this romanticized view of adolescence coexists with much less idealized representations of young people, especially in the media. This particular contradiction is tentatively teased out in a brief coda to the main argument, with reference to another idiosyncratic adolescent narrator who has managed to capture the popular imagination in recent years: Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003). Although his connection with Salinger’s text is less immediately obvious than Vernon’s, in some ways Christopher is a more legitimate heir to Holden Caulfield than Pierre’s protagonist.

SHOULD FIRMS SAVE OR INVEST THEIR WAY OUT OF CRISES?

Ioannis Ioannou looks at the curious incident of the dog that didn't bark

A “Curious Incident”: Representations of Autism in Children’s Detective Fiction

A “Curious Incident”: Representations of Autism in Children’s Detective Fiction Michelle Resene (bio) Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) was marketed as a mystery novel when it was first published, and numerous scholars, including Ruth Gilbert and Stefania Ciocia, have speculated that the choice of genre was a major component in its success. However, very little has been said about how the novel follows mystery novel conventions, or more importantly, how it deviates from them. Despite protagonist and narrator Christopher’s claim that he is “writing a murder mystery novel,” The Curious Incident is actually a coming-of-age story that focuses on Christopher’s struggle to understand himself and the world around him (5). The “murder” that Christopher investigates, the stabbing of his neighbor’s dog with a pitchfork, is a blind for the real mystery—why his mother left him and his father when Christopher was twelve years old. Both puzzles are easily solved by the reader in the first one hundred pages, leaving the remainder of the book to accomplish Haddon’s deeper goal: a complex representation of how Christopher interprets the world through the lens of autism and how that world responds to Christopher in return. Haddon’s decision to use a teenager with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as his first-person narrator and detective fiction as his narrative frame for The Curious Incident is indeed curious from a disability studies perspective, because an individual with autism, as it is depicted in Christopher’s narrative, would seem to be excluded from the work of the detective. A successful detective must generally interrogate suspects in order, first, to determine when they are lying and, second, to root out their motives. Because Christopher has difficulty lying or mind reading, as I will explain further below, he is unable to fulfill either of these basic tasks, and as a result he is unsuccessful as both a detective and a narrator of detective fiction. The result is that readers step into the detective role that Christopher is unable to fill, making them the superior investigators. [End Page 81] This is troubling since Christopher both establishes his identity and asserts his authority as narrator based on his ability to solve the mystery in the same manner as his hero, Sherlock Holmes, whom he reads as autistic. If Christopher is unable to fulfill the detective role due to his intellectual disability, then that can lead readers to assume that he—and therefore the real child or teenager with autism—is somehow intellectually inferior to the neurotypical1 reader. Although Haddon’s narrative fails to meet the criteria for detective fiction, since its release in 2003, several mystery novels with autistic protagonists have been published for children and young adults. The focus here will be to contrast Haddon’s treatment of the autistic protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with Siobhan Dowd’s in The London Eye Mystery (2007), particularly demonstrating how Dowd, unlike Haddon, gives agency to her autistic protagonist over the neurotypical reader. She focuses on material evidence rather than Ted’s memories of prior events, thereby making it impossible for the reader to access any information that Ted lacks. In addition, she uses Ted’s deep interest in the weather to signpost her narrative so that readers are able to follow the storyline more easily. Her use of weather metonyms rather than metaphors, which Ted has difficulty grasping, further emphasizes that he is in control of his own story. Dowd’s decision to privilege her autistic narrator as the only person capable of solving the mystery has the potential not only to empower actual children with ASDs, but to create a greater sense of empathy within the neurotypical reader. The Curious Incident of the Autistic Detective In Autism: Explaining the Enigma, Uta Frith theorizes that Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps most detectives from the “golden age” of detective fiction, were “on the spectrum” (124–25, 154). She argues that “the detached detectives of classic mysteries are not only eccentric and odd, but they are reminiscent of extremely clever people with autism” (24). The “oddness” Frith...

Translators: Travellers, Not Tourists

The article explores various representations of culture(s) found in contemporary English children’s literature and discusses how they were rendered into Slovene. In the first part, some introductory definitions of culture and approaches to the translation of children’s literature are presented. In the second part, excerpts from selected literary works (for instance, Mary Poppins, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Matilda, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) are examined, both from the source and the target texts, with more attention paid to the cultural contexts, and the social changes that possibly influenced the translator’s decisions.

Seeing Broadly: A Cultural Omnivore’s Menu

Seeing Broadly:A Cultural Omnivore’s Menu Jill Dolan (bio) ON THE TOWN. Music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Directed by John Rando. Lyric Theatre, New York City. SIDE SHOW. Music by Henry Krieger, lyrics by Bill Russell. Directed by Bill Condon. St. James Theatre, New York City. FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. Book by Itamar Moses, music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. Directed by Daniel Aukin. Public Theater, New York City. HERE LIES LOVE. Concept and lyrics by David Byrne, music by Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Directed by Alex Timber. Public Theater, New York City. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME. Written by Simon Stephens. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York City. THE COUNTRY HOUSE. By Donald Margulies. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Samuel J. Friedman Theater, New York City. DISGRACED. By Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Kimberly Senior. Lyceum Theatre, New York City. THE INVISIBLE HAND. By Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. New York Theatre Workshop, New York City. THE OLDEST BOY. By Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Rebecca Taichman. Lincoln Center Theatre, New York City. [End Page 295] Broadway and Off-Broadway, which we disparagingly called “the mainstream” when I was a young lesbian feminist theatre critic in the early 1980s, has become a much more eclectic assortment of forms, contents, and ideologies than it was thirty years ago. When the Public Theater announced the spring 2015 transfer to Broadway of the musical theatre adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, I was struck again by what seems a tectonic shift. Fun Home’s provenance reflects the era when I frequented the WOW Café and other downtown storefront theatres because they programmed formally innovative performance that spoke to my political interests and my identity concerns more than anything on or Off-Broadway. Fun Home boasts a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, of Five Lesbian Brothers fame, who became one of the first WOW artists to enjoy a more commercial career. Likewise, syndicated cartoonist Bechdel published a popular strip called Dykes to Watch Out For in lesbian magazines and newspapers from 1983 to 2008. Fun Home, her 2006 memoir, described coming out as lesbian just as she found out that her father was a closeted gay man, shortly before he killed himself. The book established Bechdel’s shift into wider circulation. We must continue to agitate for a broader representation of work by people of color, women, and lesbian playwrights, directors, and designers on and Off-Broadway. But the musical Fun Home’s move from downtown to midtown illustrates the more eclectic, aesthetically diverse, politically various theatre now offered in venues that were once much more formally and thematically conservative and uniform, and that once served what seemed a gate-keeping function. I saw nine exemplary productions in fall 2014 that helped me parse this redefinition of the mainstream: on Broadway, director John Rando’s revival of On the Town, the Bernstein, Comden, and Green musical; The Country House, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Donald Margulies’s newest work; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, a theatrical adaptation of a novel about an autistic boy; Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama; and Side Show, the Bill Condon–directed, remounted, and revised musical about the conjoined twins, Violet and Daisy Hilton. Off-Broadway, I took in Fortress of Solitude, an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s coming-of-age novel about Brooklyn in the 1970s, at the Public Theater; Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s immersive musical extravaganza about Imelda Marcos, also at the Public; Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy, at Lincoln Center Theatre; and Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, at New York Theatre Workshop. First performed in 1944, On the Town was probably the most “classic” of these nine productions and might represent Broadway in all its white, straight, middle-class conventional glory if it were not for Rando’s exhilarating, funny eye. Bernstein’s music remains wonderful, the dancing (originally choreographed by Jerome Robbins) was transporting, and Rando’s direction staged a deliriously pleasurable conversation with old forms and new ideas. He demonstrated a canny willingness to...

Sea of Hooks

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessSea of HooksJeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., Lloyd I. Sederer, M.D.Jeffrey L. GellerSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H., Editor, Lloyd I. SedererSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Dec 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.651217AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail by Lindsay Hill; Kingston, New York, McPherson & Company, 2013, 349 pagesI am not sure who or which is more strange and unique—the book’s protagonist or its style.StyleThis book has no chapters: it is a seemingly endless series of sections, each with a short title and anywhere from seven words to two pages of exegesis. Nor does the narrative follow linear time; we ricochet from present to past and back to present. We follow Christopher Westall, the protagonist, as he inhabits San Francisco, Bhutan, and his idiosyncratic interior. Reflections and meditations, often in italics, intersperse the story of a very lost soul and those he meets, who are equally lost, but in different ways.The people we meetChristopher seems to have some form of autism spectrum disorder, I infer, from the oddness of his thoughts, his social maladroitness, his learning problems yet brilliance at bridge and bond trading, the meaning he attributes to the detritus he finds about him (which he endows with great importance), and the imaginary, separate reality that occupies his mind. His mother kills herself in his old room, which prompts his eastern adventure. His father was an alcoholic. Christopher was sexually abused as a teenager by a trusted tutor. He became a protégé of an older man, Dr. Thorn, who walked back into his burning house to his death.There were others:RinpocheTrungpa Rinpoche was the 11th descendent in the line of Trungpa tülkus, important teachers of the Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.NeurotypicalsPeople with Asperger’s disorder (now part of autism spectrum disorder, thanks to DSM-5) regard those who are not so affected as “neurotypicals.” I am a neurotypical. I have my limitations.A more curious incidentHave you read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? That’s a fascinating book, which is about to open as a Broadway play.Philip GlassI recall the first time I heard the music of Philip Glass. I went to a concert of his music with a very accomplished musician and music educator. She was entranced by his work. I immediately disliked it and its dysphoric tonality. I never could acquire the taste for his work. I guess I am conventional in my music and in my literary tastes.Some reviewers have greeted Lindsay Hill, the author of Sea of Hooks, as a brilliant innovator; they say this first novel (after a career as a poet) is a remarkable piece of writing. I would not have finished the book had I not committed to review it. Maybe he is an acquired taste?Dr. Sederer is medical director of the New York State Office of Mental Health and adjunct professor at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, New York City.The reviewer reports no financial relationships with commercial interests. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 65Issue 12 December 01, 2014Pages e12-e12 Metrics The reviewer reports no financial relationships with commercial interests.PDF download History Published online 1 December 2014 Published in print 1 December 2014

Semiotic Resources in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: The Narrative Power of the Visual in Multimodal Fiction

Multimodal fiction, as recently studied by Hallet (2009), Gibbons (2012), and Maziarczyk (2011; 2012), among others, is the phenomenon shared by those novels which combine various semiotic modes in the development of the narrative. The purpose of the present work is to account for the most salient semiotic resources used in the multimodal novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2004). In view of the work which still needs to be done in the field, and the increasing profusion and diversity of multimodal literary forms in recent years, this study aims at throwing new light upon the diverse and significant ways in which the strategic inclusion of various semiotic resources operates in fiction. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_2-1_5

The Role of Postmodern Hybrid Texts in Translation-oriented Text Analysis (TOTA) Courses in Translation Didactics

Translation Oriented Text Analysis courses offered at universities are one of the basic courses that concentrate on analysis, identification of text-types, and text reception. Within the context of this course, basic concepts such as functions of language, text conventions, and text typology are discussed, exemplified and studied. Being one of the text types, postmodern texts are hybrid texts in which polyphonic, multi discursive texts that cover intense intertextuality references are embedded. As they texts include different text types in their structure, hence their hybridity, they provide a valuable database for analytical studies in Translation Oriented Text Analysis courses. The aim of this paper is to analyze Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Among the texts and discourses covered in the novel are advertisements, prayers, announcements, signs, poems, songs, plays, legal statements etc. This novel provides unique opportunities for the identification of text types, discussion of text conventions and the practice of translation in Translation Oriented Text Analysis course in translation didactics.

Cross-Curricular Teaching: The Case of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The knowledge learners acquire at school has to be applicable in practice to ensure their motivation for learning. Both cross-curricular and interdisciplinary teaching provide a meaningful way in which students can use the knowledge acquired in one context as the basis for learning in other contexts in and out of school. By using interdisciplinary teaching, the instructor can present the topics in a holistic manner: this approach therefore allows us to activate more of the learners’ senses and intelligences. Since Mathematics is one of the least liked subjects by our students, and English one of the favorite ones, the article will demonstrate how we can integrate activities addressing all types of intelligences in a language learning class to achieve the whole range of Bloom’s levels of educational objectives on the basis of a novel which includes a wealth of references to mathematics: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which has recently been compulsory reading in all Slovene grammar school programs.

Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room

Drawing on a corpus of online reviews, my article carries out a qualitative study of readers' responses to the child narrators of two contemporary novels, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Emma Donoghue's Room (2010). What these narrators have in common is that they are both are affected by developmental disorders: Christopher, the protagonist of The Curious Incident, is on the autistic spectrum, whereas Jack – the five-year-old narrator of Room – was born and brought up in captivity. Through my analysis of the reviews I explore the interplay of defamiliarization and empathy in readers' engagement with these “strange” narrators; I also show how empathetic perspective-taking can work in tandem with sympathy (feeling for a character from an observer position).

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese Ralph James Savarese (bio) and Lisa Zunshine (bio) 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, the two fields seem vulnerable to caricature. The former sometimes applies scientific and medical insights uncritically (such as the assertion that autistics have no theory of mind and, thus, cannot read fiction); the latter sometimes advances a completely social-constructionist understanding of physiological distinction (as if stigma were the entire story of alternative embodiment). Scholars in cognitive approaches to literature need the insights of disability studies to think about mind, narrative, and agency in neurodiverse ways; scholars in disability studies need the insights of cognitive approaches to literature to give the concept of neurodiversity, [End Page 17] which is quickly becoming a kind of platitude, some actual neuroscientific content. Talking across conventional disciplinary divides has precipitated questions that we would never have thought to ask. It has also made us hope that an ongoing conversation between cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies will transform both fields. We cannot foresee the exact shape of this transformation, but the formerly distinct trajectories already feel more intertwined. A Postcolonial Neurology Lisa Zunshine (LZ): In her recent contribution to Disability Studies Quarterly, Paula C. Durbin-Westby, an autistic disability rights activist, builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to stress the importance of the “inclusion of autistics as active collaborators in research, rather than mere research subjects to be studied and then written about, often in language that many autistic people find demeaning. We must insist,” she writes, “on being ‘speaking subjects,’ with our participation and input used in meaningful ways, rather than being ‘spoken subjects,’ a position which can lead to misinterpretation of research results and to uninformed experiments.” Would you comment on the ramifications of this practice of adapting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies to disability studies? Ralph James Savarese (RJS): The postcolonial analogy can be traced back to a number of scholars, including Arthur Frank, who in The Wounded Storyteller likens medical patients to colonized peoples: the former’s bodies have been rationally conquered and their indigenous experience of illness or disability has been haughtily disregarded. In its place, an official narrative, in something like a foreign language, has prevailed, leaving patients feeling both alienated and disempowered. But over the last thirty years or so, patients, like postcolonial subjects, have begun to write back to this kind of empire. According to Frank, “Postcolonialism in its most generalized form is the demand to speak rather than to be spoken for . . . or, in the worst cases, rather than being effaced entirely” (13). The rhetoric of postcolonial studies thus helps us to think about the historical circumstances of the neurological other: the subaltern has not only learned to speak, it has also begun to organize, as the neurodiversity movement and organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network make clear. Insisting on the right to self-determination and advancing a notion of autism as neurological difference, not pathology, ASAN has agitated for progress on a range of issues: from better education, employment, and housing opportunities to better, more respectful medical care and scientific research. The difference between the privileged outsider view and the newly empowered insider one is, however, considerable, and because the scientific community often has trouble with what autistic writer Dawn Prince calls “the superior part of speaking” (“The Silence Between”)—namely, listening—it continues to cause [End Page 18] damage. Think, for instance, of the common claim that autistics don’t experience empathy, which popular novels such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime have only further promulgated. This claim is prevalent in the many fields that make up cognitive aesthetics.1 If one actually listens to autistics, one hears a different story. Stephen Shore, for example, distinguishes between being...