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Cody Marrs, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics of All Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 148, ISBN: 9780192871725. Reviewedby Pilar Martínez Benedí

This essay explores Edith Wharton’s narrative strategies in The Age of Innocence from a cognitive perspective. My purpose is less to describe the cognitive mechanism underlying the act of reading than to reflect on how writers may capitalize on our cognitive proclivities to achieve a certain effect—in this case, surprise. Starting from the notion of “theory of mind” or “mind-reading”—the ability to understand others’ outward behavior in terms of underlying mental or emotional states, which, according to some cognitive critics, “makes literature as we know it possible”—I explore the ways in which this cognitive proclivity to read fictional minds can be turned on its head, and into a kind of “mind-misreading.” With all its silences and “undertelling,” The Age of Innocence, it seems, summons the reader’s theory of mind proclivities. However, in Wharton’s novel the reader’s apparently free “mind-readings” are compromised and manipulated by a fluid focalization and, on the other hand, by an artful use of “mind-blinding” mechanisms that tease our cognitive endowments (together with the protagonist’s), turning an apparently everyday task of mind-reading into an unacknowledged case of (literary) mind-blindness.

This essay analyzes Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018), a novel that ostensibly demands an eco-critical reading, under the lens of neurodiversity. Focusing on the idiosyncrasies of sensory perception in autism, the essay explores the atypical engagement with the more-than-human that neurodiversity (and specifically autism) fosters—a kind of engagement that deeply destabilizes neuro-normative, human-centered subjectivity, opening up to more egalitarian ways of relation with the environment. In a novel populated by neurodivergent characters with a keen ecological sensibility, Powers comes close to imagining this kind of non-hierarchical connection with the natural world. The essay explores how neurodiversity works in the novel at a characterological, thematic, and structural level, functioning as a bridge between human and non-human scales. In this way, neurodiversity finely glosses and articulates the kind of animistic, environmental message that Powers instils in his Pulitzer prize winning novel.