Engaging Minds

“Engaging Minds is a brilliant monograph that artfully weaves together insights from disability studies, narratology, and American Modernism to re-imagine how we read and analyze representations of (dis)abled minds. Chaloupka lights up a vast array of under-discussed effects of these minds on a fiction’s narrative order, character system, readerly experience, and beyond. Engaging Minds deftly shows how, in many cases, the disabled mind serves as an underlying organizing logic; resisting the impulse to examine disability primarily through the lens of an individual character, his work offers what we might call a political-relational formalism, which re-thinks what it means to read ‘for’ disability. Ultimately, Chaloupka’s formalist approach adds tremendous value to the literary study of cognitive disability, particularly as his close reading is marshalled in the service of understanding readerly affect and its implications for cultivating a more ethical relation to disability.”–Christina Fogarasi, University of Copenhagen

“A rich contribution to the critical conversation in literary disability studies, Evan Chaloupka’s Engaging Minds offers ways to consider what lived experiences with cognitive disability might be. Attending to the varied forms of narrative mediation created by American writers, this book shows how the distance between the minds of the author, fictional characters, and readers can serve as a speculative space where a new mode of intimacy may emerge.”–Kenji Kihara, Tsuda University

Evan Chaloupka is a Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsuda. His work on disability and narrative has been published in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Disability & Society, among other venues.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.