Neurotecs: Detectives, Disability and Cognitive Exceptionality in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

The rise of disability studies as a noted feature of criticism within the humanities is a process dating from the mid-1990s. The foundations of critical approaches contained within this emerging subject area come from attitudes inherited from social science perspectives, notably a commitment to political action: Davis (1997:1) has stated that ‘The exciting thing about disability studies is that it is both an academic field of inquiry and an area of political activity’. Aligned with this is a desire not to see disability in the traditional categories with which it is often associated, namely absence, lack or loss. These categories constitute the predominant manner through which disability is usually played out in fictional texts, particularly as a metaphor that nearly always relates to ableist concerns and paradigms, or as a prosthetic narrative device in which non-disabled concerns are propped up and relativised by the use of disabled characters. In their seminal work on cultural representations of the disabled, Mitchell and Snyder (2000:127) note not only that disability is seen to function as ‘the master trope of human disqualification in modernity’, but also that, used in such a tropic fashion, ‘disability pervades literary narrative, first as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000:47).