Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (NYU Press, 2016), and The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species (Columbia, 2024). He is also the editor of the Norton Library Frankenstein (Norton, 2022).
Michael Bérubé
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Writing on Public Books
Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn’t answer.
Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art, in culture, in politics, et cetera—especially in the case of physical disability. This, I thought, fell short of the field’s promise for literary studies. […]
