Autistic Disturbances : Theorizing Autism Poetics From the DSM to Robinson Crusoe

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics. Reinterpreting characteristic autistic verbal practices such as repetition in the context of a more widely respected literary canon, Julia Miele Rodas argues that autistic language is actually an essential part of mainstream literary aesthetics, visible in poetry by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, in novels by Charlotte Brontë and Daniel Defoe, in life writing by Andy Warhol, and even in writing by figures from popular culture. Autistic Disturbances pursues these resonances and explores the tensions of language and culture that lead to the classification of some verbal expression as disordered while other, similar expression enjoys prized status as literature. It identifies the most characteristic patterns of autistic expression-repetition, monologue, ejaculation, verbal ordering or list-making, and neologism-and adopts new language to describe and reimagine these categories in aesthetically productive terms. In so doing, the book seeks to redress the place of verbal autistic language, to argue for the value and complexity of autistic ways of speaking, and to invite recognition of an obscured tradition of literary autism at the very center of Anglo-American text culture. Contents......Page 8 Foreword by Melanie Yergeau......Page 10 Preface: Involuntarity and Intentionality......Page 12 1. Introduction......Page 20 2. Articulating Autism Poetics......Page 50 3. On the Surprising Elasticity of Taxonomical Rhetoric......Page 96 4. Nothingness Himself......Page 118 41⁄2. (Why “Bartleby” Doesn’t Live Here)......Page 136 5. Neuroqueer Narration in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette......Page 144 6. The Absence of the Object: Autistic Voice and Literary Architecture in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein......Page 166 7. Autism and Narrative Invention in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe......Page 184 UnConclusion—Because the Butterfly: Autistic Infinitudes......Page 198 An Accounting: Autistic Ejaculations......Page 212 Notes......Page 216 Works Cited......Page 218 Acknowledgments: A Litany......Page 234 Index......Page 238 "The work of Autistic Disturbances is to explore in depth the particularities and possibilities of autistic language. To that end, it draws on literary criticism and clinical theory, but, mindful of the extent to which autistic voices have been silenced, the book seeks to foreground autistic speaking, sometimes in ways that readers may find unexpected or challenging" -- Provided by publisher