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>> vii Acknowledgments Writing, as all writers know, is generally a solitary, often a lonely pursuit . This project seemed especially so. I wrote most of my first book in grad school, and so had the support and good company of a faculty committee and assorted fellow students. I didn’t have a full-time job, didn’t have children. We were all there together working on our books. Then, if we were fortunate, we got academic jobs. Perhaps our families expanded. It took more effort and ingenuity to create and sustain social and professional communities. I didn’t do such a good job of that. My book about disarticulation—in its linguistic and social senses—was written in something of a disarticulated condition. It became a ten-year struggle to articulate. I was not entirely alone, of course. My colleagues in the English Department at Hofstra University, where I taught from 1997–2007, were enormously supportive and contributed significantly to my thinking . Let me mention with particular gratitude Lee Zimmerman, Tom Couser, John Bryant, Shari Zimmerman, and Sabina Sawney. During my time at Hofstra, I received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2002–2003), which helped me greatly in my writing. Thanks also to my new colleagues in American Studies and English at Yale. This new job—teaching courses that expand my thinking, replacing a two-hour commute on I95 with a fifteen-minute bike ride, and a semester research leave not stipulated in the standard senior lecturer ’s contract—has greatly assisted me in finishing the book. And my heartfelt thanks to the following, whose help in the form of comments on drafts, conversation about the project, or general encouragement has been invaluable: Jeffrey Bernstein, Avital Ronnell, Tobin Siebers, Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, Jean-Jacques Poucel, and viii > ix write a book about them, but a sentence now seems beyond me. In any event, they draw, dance, know the meanings of “soporific” and “exquisite ,” can tell you the story of The Magic Flute (and mimic the Queen of the Night’s arias), climb trees, can’t quite bicycle without training wheels—no, wait, they just learned last week!—, are not convinced, I don’t think, that there’s no crying in baseball. I am exhausted all the time. I want only to be present for them and out of their way, and let them exhaust me till I’m one hundred. Finally, thanks to my wife, Jennifer Klein—my best friend, closest comrade, colleague, and true love; a wonderful mother, a superb scholar, and developing into a pretty good jazz drummer. Jennifer, like her father, the late Ted Klein, is an exemplar of integrity and moral courage. Jen and I were working on our books over most of the same years, and she beat me to publication by a year—thus, I get to footnote her rather than the other way round! We both write about care—in very different but overlapping senses—so we’ve been able to help each other a great deal. We next plan to do a writing project together. We’ll see if we can; I won’t spell it out here, but if we pull it off, it will be a good one. Anyway, thank you, Jen, from the bottom of my heart, for everything. * * * Portions of this book have, in differing versions, appeared elsewhere, and I am grateful to the original publishers for permission to reprint. Part of chapter 3 appeared in PMLA 120 (2005) as “Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns Against Language.” Part of chapter 4 appeared in JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Writing, Multiple Literacies , and Politics 24 (2004) as “Trauma Without Disability, Disability Without Trauma: A Disciplinary Divide”; and part appeared in American Book Review 26.6 (2006) as “Models of Uncaring.” Part of chapter 5 appeared in Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen, as “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum.” This page intentionally left blank ...

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