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

238 Pages·2016·1.23 MB·English

by  Michael Bérubé

The Secret Life of Stories
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Michael Bérubé
The Secret Life of Stories
From Don Quixote
to Harry Potter,
How Understanding
Intellectual Disability
Transforms the Way We Read
N E W Y O R K U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2016 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were ac-
curate at the time of writing. Neither the author
nor New York University Press is responsible for
URLs that may have expired or changed since the
manuscript was prepared.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-2361-1
For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
data, please contact the Library of Congress.
New York University Press books are printed on
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Also available as an ebook
In memory of Anne Clarke Bérubé
(1935–2013)
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We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of
our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating
ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed. Te narra-
tive impulse is as old as our oldest literature: myth and folktale appear to be
stories we recount in order to explain and understand where no other form
of explanation will work. Te desire and the competence to tell stories also
reach back to an early stage in the individual’s development, to about the age
of three, when a child begins to show the ability to put together a narrative in
coherent fashion and especially the capacity to recognize narratives, to judge
their well-formedness. Children quickly become virtual Aristotelians, insist-
ing upon any storyteller’s observation of the “rules,” upon proper beginnings,
middles, and particularly ends.
—Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Stories 1
Chapter One Motive 33
Chapter two Time 73
Chapter three Self-Awareness 117
Conclusion: Minds 167
Notes 195
Works Cited 207
Index 215
About the Author 223
ix