Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?

In this provocative study, Pilar Martinez-Benedí and Ralph James Savarese reveal the great anticipator Herman Melville’s illumination of the hidden life of the sensory and the neural unconscious. In a work more dialogic than diagnostic, Martinez-Benedí and Savarese explore Melville’s advocacy for the perceptual and his ardent overcoming of biased categories and limiting social constructs. They cast wildchild and cosmopolitan Melville as the bard of neuroatypicality. -- Professor Suzanne Keen, Author of Empathy and the Novel and Thomas Hardy's Brains Busting the false binary of frontal-lobe rationalism and neural-subject feeling, and demonstrating instead the critical adjacency of the two, Martínez-Benedí and Savarese— in tight, revealing, and always engaging treatments of a full range of Melville writings — blend science, humanities, and the logics of neurodiversity to unpack for us new ways of reading literature and new ways of exploring the sources of Melville’s creativity. -- John Bryant, author of 'Melville Unfolding' and 'Herman Melville: A Half Known Life' Benedí and Savarese reveal the many ways Melville anticipates and explores embodied cognition, how he builds characters from the senses up, eschewing categorization of the wayward human subject. This is a thoughtful, passionate, and admirable reappraisal of Melville that closes the gap between the humanities and the sciences. * Richard Ruppel, Chapman University, USA *