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IN THeory 4 Fall 2013One morning in seminar, ourfearless leader Michael Bérubédistributed around the tablea short excerpt from Mrs.Dalloway, in which VirginiaWoolf describes a character “overcomewith his own grief, which rose like amoon looked at from a terrace, ghastlybeautiful with light from the sunken day.”In the novel’s next sentence, the griefstrickenfigure, Peter Walsh, puts his handout toward Clarissa Dalloway, pullingher into the metaphor alongside him:“There above them it hung,that moon. She too seemedto be sitting with him on theterrace, in the moonlight.”With remarkable economy,Woolf’s sentences set beforeus one of the central problemswe’d been grappling within our seminar all summer:how is it that literatureoffers such a unique, andseemingly unmatched, mode ofnavigating the traffic that takesplace between the minds ofseparate people? What specific resourcesdoes literature bring to the venerablyirresolvable problem—tackled over thecenturies by philosophers, artists, mystics,and now neurobiologists and cognitivescientists—of accessing, knowing, andeven “entering” mental states that are notone’s own? Or, as Bérubé excitedly putthe question to us: What is it about thatmoon?But if Peter and Clarissa’s shared griefoffered us one point of entry to thethemes of our course, it didn’t get us allthe way there. Our more specific concernthis summer lay in exploring how themechanisms of literary narrative canthemselves be warped and transformedby the presence of characters withatypical or disabled mental capacities.Why is the literary such a powerfulregister for exploring the minds ofcharacters who are seemingly unableto distinguish their own thoughtsand experiences from those of others?The scope of this question, it turnsout, is remarkably far-reaching. If, asTobin Siebers has argued, disabilityfunctions as a “master trope of humandisqualification,” the disabled or atypicalmind and/or brain challenges us tothink differently about who is and whois not accorded the status of personhood.Guided by Bérubé’s unflaggingenthusiasm (and seemingly effortlesscommand of at least the last century’sworth of literature, theory, and culturalhistory), our seminar traversed an oftenhead-spinning succession of furtherissues, as impressively diverse as theinterests of the seminar’s participants.We considered, for instance, recentattempts to use cognitive psychology toexplain why readers care about fictionalcharacters; current controversies overlegal surrogacy for the intellectuallydisabled; the “glitchy” avatars created inonline disability communities; and theseductively deranging representations ofalternative cognitive styles found in J.M.Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip.“My time at SCT made me hopeful that ourscholarly practices might be transformed bymore fully acknowledging the various waysthat different minds and bodies have ofattuning to one another.”In pursuing the question of “other minds”through the specific lens of intellectualdisability, our seminar brought togethertwo separate scholarly conversationsthat have, thus far, overlapped very little:disability studies, which has long beencritical of the normalizing tendencies ofscientific and medical knowledge, andthe current vogue for so-called Darwinianliterary studies and “evolutionarycriticism,” itself part of a broader “turnto science” that disciplines across thehumanities seem to have taken in recentyears. Many of us felt a pressing needto develop more skeptical attitudestoward the authority of “science” thanwas to be found in some of the work thatwe read from the latter category. Therewere contentious moments: what else toexpect from a roomful of theory-headsconfronting scholarship that was, insome cases, openly hostile to the qualitiesthat drew so many of us to pursuegraduate work in the humanities in thefirst place? And yet there was somethingundeniably useful, and even invigorating,in encountering ideas that seemed to goagainst many of our deeply held criticalimpulses. It allowed us to discuss howlongstanding debates about (for instance)the instability of language, the functionof ideology, and the role of history inthe development of scientific reason stillprovide an indispensible counterweightto the overly gleeful embrace, in someprecincts, of what science can now tellus about the human brain, mind, andself. Indeed, the darker chapters in thehistory of disability—including variousforms of institutionalization, eugenics,even genocide—teach us all too well thehazards of uncritically acquiescing tothe authority of those claiming access toscientific truth.Though disability studies is still asmall and often marginalized academicfield, I would like to think ourcollective encounter with its methods,commitments, and modes of thoughtat the SCT this summer might provesalutary, even for those of us whoseresearch interests seem tolie quite far afield fromdisability studies per se.Academics in general,and particularly thoseof us in the hothouseof graduate school, areeasily enthralled byvirtuosic, solo feats ofintellectual mastery,which often seem torequire superhumanabilities of mindand body. Engagingwith disability as both a trope and aprovocation for theoretical reflectionmight encourage us to cultivate stylesof thinking, and being, that are lessalienated from the everyday messiness ofexperience than the largely disembodied,“critical” voice many of us have beentrained to adopt. What new modes ofscholarship might become availableby slowing down and lingering witha problem while setting aside theoverweening ambition to conquer it, orconceptualizing intellectual labor in termsthat are less relentlessly individual?My time at SCT made me hopeful that ourscholarly practices might be transformedby more fully acknowledging thevarious ways that different minds andbodies have of attuning to one another.In informal late-night reading groups,heady discussions underneath waterfalls,or simply sitting together on Cornell’sArts Quad after a heated seminardiscussion, the ethos of conviviality tobe found at SCT provided an almostideal (and certainly idyllic) environmentin which to experiment with some ofthese possibilities. A bit like Peter Walshand Clarissa Dalloway’s moonlit terrace(though without, thankfully, the pangof grief!), our summer together in Ithacaoffered a glimpse of other modes ofaffiliation and collective contemplationthat may yet become possible.Leon HiltonNew York University