Michael Bérubé

Michael Berube

The author explores contemporary ideas about family values, social justice, and the sanctity of life through his experiences raising a child with Down's syndrome and his struggle to keep his son's personhood in view. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child

Life as We Know it

How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of reading Narrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine. We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their “well-formedness” within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk. Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of writing then re-wired our brains. In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé tells a dramatically different tale, in a compelling account of how an understanding of intellectual disability can transform our understanding of narrative. Instead of focusing on characters with disabilities, he shows how ideas about intellectual disability inform an astonishingly wide array of narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the experience of reading. Interweaving his own stories with readings of such texts as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Bérubé puts his theory into practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role of disability studies within it. Armed only with the tools of close reading, Bérubé demonstrates the immensely generative possibilities in the ways disability is deployed within fiction, finding in them powerful meditations on what it means to be a social being, a sentient creature with an awareness of mortality and causality—and sentience itself. Persuasive and witty, Michael Bérubé engages Harry Potter fans and scholars of literature alike. For all readers, The Secret Life of Stories will fundamentally change the way we think about the way we read.

From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read

The Secret Life of Stories

Facing threats like climate change and nuclear warfare, science fiction authors have conjured apocalyptic scenarios of human extinction. Can such gloomy fates help us make sense of our contemporary crises? How important is the survival of our species if we wind up battling for an Earth that has become an unhabitable hellscape? What other possible futures do narratives of the end of humanity allow us to imagine? Michael Bérubé explores the surprising insights of classic and contemporary works of SF that depict civilizational collapse and contemplate the fate of Homo sapiens. In a lively, conversational style, he considers novels by writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Liu Cixin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, as well as films that feature hostile artificial intelligence, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and the Terminator and Matrix franchises. Bérubé argues that these works portray a future in which we have become able to see ourselves from the vantage point of something other than the human. Though framed by the possibility of human extinction, they are driven by a vision of the “ex-human”—a desire to imagine that another species is possible. For all science fiction readers worried about the fate of humanity, The Ex-Human is an entertaining yet sobering account of how key novels and films envision the world without us.

Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species

The Ex-Human

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In The Employment of English, Michael Berube examines the cultural legitimacy of literary study. Berube asserts that we must situate these questions in a context in which nearly half of all college professors are part-time labor and in which English departments are torn between their traditional mission of defining the movements of literary history and the protocols of textual interpretation, and their newer tasks of interrogating wider systems of signification under rubrics like "gender," "hegemony," "rhetoric," "textuality" (including film and video), and "culture."

Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies

The Employment of English

The subject of the aesthetic has returned to cultural and literary debates with a vengeance. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies is a timely and authoritative collection of essays that analyze the role of aesthetics in American and British cultural studies, and reflect on its recuperation in the field. Contains first-rate, original essays that analyze the role of aesthetics in American and British cultural studies, and reflect on its recuperation in the field. Contributors are leading scholars, internationally based. Includes substantial introductory material by the editor.

The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies

A nationally known scholar, essayist, and public advocate for the humanities, Michael Berube has a rapier wit and a singular talent for parsing complex philosophical, theoretical, and political questions. Rhetorical Occasions collects twenty-four of his major essays and reviews, plus a sampling of entries on literary theory and contemporary culture from his award-winning weblog. Selected to showcase the range of public writing available to scholars, the essays are grouped into five topical sections: the Sokal hoax and its effects on the humanities; cosmopolitanism, American studies, and cultural studies; daily academic life inside and outside the classroom; the events of September 11, 2001, and their political aftermath; and the potential discursive and tonal range of academic blog writing. In lively and entertaining prose, Berube offers a wide array of interventions into matters academic and nonacademic. By example and illustration, he reminds readers that the humanities remain central to our understanding of what it means to be human.

Essays on Humans and the Humanities

Rhetorical Occasions

A nationally known scholar, essayist, and public advocate for the humanities, Michael B©rub© has a rapier wit and a singular talent for parsing complex philosophical, theoretical, and political questions. Rhetorical Occasions collects twenty-four o

Amidst the carnage of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg posed a stark choice for humanity: socialism or barbarism. Violence Today asks if current patterns mark a decent into the barbarism that Luxemburg feared and if a just society, one capable of transcending the endemic violence of the neoliberal order, is possible in the new century. This powerful and provocative new collection explores the roots of violence -- military, terrorist, criminal, and casual -- in contemporary society. It analyzes the social context, history, and structure of modern violence, casting light on patterns and practices from America's inner cities and prisons to "failed states" like Afghanistan. Violence Today also gives special attention to debate within the Left about violence, including a controversial defense of armed struggle. Contributors: John Berger, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Peter Thomas, Vivek Chibber, Christian Parenti, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Georgi Derluguian, Sofiri Joab-Peterside, Ulrich Oslender, Achin Vanaik, Barabara Harriss-White, Lynne Segal, Joe Sim and Steve Tombs, Dennis Rodgers, Avishai Erlich, Philip Green, Garance Upham, Mary des Chenes and Stephen Mikesell, Samir Amin.

Michael Bérubé

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