Podcast appearances and mentions of ralph savarese

Charity Nebbe is joined by poet Ralph Savarese to discuss his newest book of poems.

On this episode, we talk with Ralph Savarese, professor of English at Grinnell, about his new book, "See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor." Over the course of many years, he read novels with autistic people, including his son, DJ. This book compiles those experiences and challenges commonly accepted notions about autism, and encouraged us to reconsider how we think about literature and the world around us. We also feature music from Seth Hanson '17, whose new album, "Not Too Deep," wrestles with the tension of remembering and saying goodbye to a special place. 

Liad Weiss tells us about how our purchases can reflect our self-perception. Susan Schulten explains how we can use maps as a lens to understand our American history. Rebecca Helm informs us about the tiny ecosystems of organisms that live off of plastic islands in the ocean. Ralph Savarese discusses reading literature with those who have autism.

Ralph Savarese of Grinnell College advances the notion of a much less human-centered empathy by exploring the propensity in autism to attend to objects more than people (February 19, 2014). Focusing on the work of two autistic writers, Dawn Prince and Tito Mukhopadhyay, he investigates the trope of personification, appealing to neuroscientific investigations of the phenomenon in order to distinguish between a categorical and a precategorical engagement with experience. Lyric writing, especially poetry, plays a controlled game with categories, dwelling in the sensory and blurring distinctions through a range of literary devices such as personification and metaphor. For Prince and for Mukhopadhyay, the space of lyric writing appears to welcome autistic difference. Ralph James Savarese is the author of "Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption," which Newsweek called "a real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities," and the co-editor of three collections, including "Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity," a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly. The winner of the Herman Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, he spent the academic year 2012/2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University's Institute for Brain Sciences. He teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa. The Disability Studies Initiative at Emory is a new working group (beginning Fall 2013) generated across departments and schools that is dedicated to interdisciplinary research and teaching by faculty and students. The Initiative is led by a group of faculty and students who are interested in the social, cultural, historical, political, and legal dimensions of disability in our world. http://www.disabilitystudies.emory.edu

Critiquing a number of stubborn clichés about autism and embracing the concept of neurodiversity, Savarese presents the work of Tito Mukhopadhyay, a man whom the medical community would describe as “severely autistic” and whom he has been mentoring for the past five years. (Feb. 20, 2014) The author of Reasonable People, which Newsweek called “a real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities” and the co-editor of “Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, Ralph James Savarese can be seen in the award-winning documentaryLoving Lampposts: Living Autistic and in a forthcoming documentary about his son, DJ, Oberlin College’s first nonspeaking student with autism. He spent the academic year 2012/2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences.