Engaging Minds

“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

”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

“In this fascinating book, Evan Chaloupka shows how, as the United States grew into a global power, America’s most talented writers ‘not only opened up new ways of storytelling but also brokered novel ethical orientations toward disability in which cognitive difference was reframed as a modality that was always coming to be known.’ Chaloupka cannily reorients readerly attention away from the representation of cognitive disability and toward narrative strategies of engaging with characters and exploring the parameters of cognitive disability in literary form. Engaging Minds is an ambitious and illuminating undertaking, and one from which readers will learn much.“—Michael Bérubé, author of Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child

”Engaging Minds is a carefully reasoned, important, and—I can’t resist–deeply engaging book. Evan Chaloupka brilliantly synthesizes work in disability studies, rhetorical poetics, and literary history as he illuminates the nature and significance of representations of cognitive disability in American literature in the first half of the twentieth century.“—Jim Phelan, author of Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Somebody Telling Somebody Else

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.

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