Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability) - Softcover

Rodas, Julia Miele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472053949 ISBN 13: 9780472053940

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Julia Miele Rodas is Professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. She is co-editor of a collection on disability in Jane Eyre, The Madwoman and the Blindman (The Ohio State University Press, 2012) and co-editor of the Literary Disability Studies book series for Palgrave Macmillan. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, and other venues. She teaches writing, literature, and disability studies at Bronx Community College as well as courses at Lehman College, CUNY's School for Professional Studies, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Disability, Culture & Society and serves as lead consultant on The Metropolitan Museum's "Crip the Met" initiative. See more at juliamielerodas.com

From the Back Cover

"Autistic Disturbances invites both disability scholars and literary scholars to reframe 'listening' in classic texts. Julia Miele Rodas's clever and charming approach to autistic language bids us to understand 'autism poetics' as valuable and exemplary of the generative work of language."
--Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies and Staring

"In this beautifully written book, Julia Rodas gives us autism as an aesthetic and a rhetoric. She finds autistic language in texts as diverse as poems, medical treatises, and the words of autists themselves. Like her subject, the books is replete with swerving insights, expostulations, and lists that constitutively and intellectually help us reimagine the full plentitude of the language of autism."
--Lennard Davis, author of Enforcing Normalcy and The Disability Studies Reader

From the Inside Flap

"Julia Rodas rejects ableist repertoires of what language is and can mean, notably the understanding that language necessitates understanding or intelligibility . . . readers are viscerally confronted with autism's many possibilities, are given neurodivergent mechanisms through which to re-see Villette, Frankenstein, Robinson Crusoe, and more . . . What Autistic Disturbances offers is at once a method and a style for apprehending aesthetic autism, across genre and mode. This is an incomparable book, one brimming with ideas for how to reclaim autistic echoes in a morass of literary expression."
--Melanie Yergeau, author of Authoring Autism

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472053949
• ISBN 13: 9780472053940
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248