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

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.

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