Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons?: A Primitivist Phenomenology (Explorations in Science and Literature)

Focusing on the difference between lower-level perceptual processes in the “neural unconscious” and higher-order thought in the frontal lobes, this open access book shows how Herman Melville sought to reclaim the fluid world of the sensory, with its precategorical and radically egalitarian impulses.By studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville’s work, this book offers an essential corrective to the “pathology paradigm,” which demonizes departures from a neurological norm and feasts on pejorative categorization.The neurodiversity movement arose precisely as a response to how so-called “mental disorders” have been described, understood, and treated.Unlike standard neuroscientific or psychiatric investigation, Melville’s work doesn’t strive to explain typical functioning through the negative and, in the process, to shore up a regime of normalcy.To the contrary, it exploits the lack of congealed diagnoses in the 19th Century, much more neutrally asking the question: what can