Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism, Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe PDF
Preview Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism, Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe
CoRpoRealities: Discourses of Disability Series editors: David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Recent Titles Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe by Julia Miele Rodas Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability by Shelley L. Tremain Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education by Jay Timothy Dolmage Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones, editors Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement by Suzannah BiernofF Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature by Maren Tova Linett War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence by Anne McGuire The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment by David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder Foucault and the Government of Disability, Enlarged and Revised Edition by Shelley Tremain, editor The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History by Jenell Johnson Shakiri All Over: Popular Music and Disability by George McKay The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing by David Bolt Disabled Veterans in History by David A. Gerber, editor Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life by Margaret Price Disability Aesthetics by Tobin Siebers Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability by Edward Wheatley Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing by G. Thomas Couser Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body by Michael Davidson The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness by Terry Rowden A complete list of titles in the series can be found at www.press.umich.edu Autistic Disturbances ------------- Theorizing Autism, Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe JULIA MIELE RODAS WITH A FOREWORD BY MELANIE YERGEAU University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Universita degli studi di Bergamo Biblioteca umanistica inventario n.: 095858 Copyright © 2018 by Julia Miele Rodas All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper First published July 2018 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-472-07394-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12410-7 (ebook) Cover description for accessibility: In the center of the cover is a photo taken in an artisanal button shop in Barcelona. A multitude of individual buttons of various shapes, colors, sizes, and materials are sorted, organized, and stacked in individual tubes on a custom shelf, the cover of each topped with its particular button, facing the viewer. Of the approximately seventy-five unique buttons depicted, there are hearts, a star, a piece of candy, a spiral, a flower, an ice cream cone, and a cupcake, among others. The image is cropped to include partial buttons and containers on all sides, indicating that this diversity, and the ordering of these artifacts, continues in a pattern of excess beyond the frame. Above the photograph, the book title appears in an angular serif face, followed by the subtitle in a sans serif face; below, the author and foreword writer are listed in the same sans serif type. for Jack Hall, mentor, colleague, friend and for my husband, Estuardo Rodas without whom this book would not exist Contents FOREWORD BY MELANIE YERGEAU ix PREFACE: INVOLUNTARITY and intentionality xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Articulating Autism Poetics 31 3 On the Surprising Elasticity of Taxonomical Rhetoric 77 4 Nothingness Himself 99 4x/i (Why “Bartleby” Doesn’t Live Here) 117 5 Neuroqueer Narration in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette 125 6 The Absence of the Object: Autistic Voice and Literary Architecture in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 147 7 Autism and Narrative Invention in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 165 UnConclusion—Because the Butterfly: Autistic Infinitudes 179 an accounting: autistic ejaculations 193 NOTES 197 WORKS CITED 199 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: A LITANY 215 INDEX 219 Foreword by Melanie Yergeau What does it mean, Julia Miele Rodas asks, to open a text to the “possi bilities of autism”? If autism is a potential toward which one might aspire, how might clinical-textual readings of autism shift—crumble—strive? It is hard for a foreword to do justice to a book as profound as this one. Autistic Disturbances is at once capacious and nuanced: It demarcates the whatness of autistic language—an impressive and formidable project— while refusing to confine its substance to pathological categories. Autis tic Disturbances unfurls autistic language not as a category attached to a diagnosis, but rather as a series of rhetorical and aesthetic strategies that share deep affinities with autistic cultures. Autistic language, per Rodas, is uniquely embodied and habitual. These body-habits, as it were, exceed the domain of the contemporarily- and culturally-autistic and are locat- able across literary texts from the past three centuries. With keen wit and a penetrating gaze (eye contact pun!), Rodas shows us how textual habits historically devalued as autistic are habits traditionally valued in literary texts. Indeed, if one were to spend six hours with Silva Rhetoricae’s trope index, one would find many an autistic-cum-literary pattern. For what are rhetorical schemes if not autistic, and vice versa? In pursuing these questions, Rodas describes autistic language as “terminological clouds” (which is a much cooler metaphor than Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens), taxonomies that resonate as much as they create friction. Autis tic language, she notes, is not confinable to tidy or monolithic catego ries; like literary motifs, it rains and patterns. x • Foreword Readers familiar with autism studies will understand the complexity (and guaranteed controversy) surrounding any claim about autism and language. Language is, after all, what the autistic are time and again claimed to lack. Indeed, even when autistic communication bears pass ing normative resemblance, clinicians without fail locate fault. We have at our disposal nearly infinite clinical tropes that frame autistic lan- guaging effectually as non-languaging: Absence of speech. Presence of augmentative and assistive communication. Failure to point or gesture. Pointing or gesturing too much, and with too much enjoyment, and with too much of the too much too much. Excessive repetition. Inexcessive repetition. Oversharing. Undersharing. Inability to answer “How are you?” Propensity to answer “How are you?” with train trivia or decontex- tualized lines from Die Hard. Et cetera x 47. Rodas’s book is a welcoming middle finger, if one can imagine the beckoning playfulness of such a discordant gesture. Where a clinician finds paucity, Rodas finds semiotic silence. Where a clinician finds TMI, Rodas finds apostrophe or ejaculation. In reading Autistic Disturbances, I am reminded of Neil Marcus’s claim that disability “is an art . . . an ingenious way to live.” Rodas masterfully makes the case that autism is an art, one that publics are beholden to recognize and value. More than this, however, she refuses those claims that would suggest autism and autistics have no language. In so doing, Rodas rejects ableist reper toires of what language is and can mean, notably the understanding that language necessitates understanding or intelligibility. In venerating the idiosyncratic and the echolalic, Rodas conducts analyses of literary texts notable for their autistic form by means of an autistic form. In other words, when discussing interruptive prose, Rodas interrupts her own prose— beautifully, rigidly, and impassionedly. In this way, readers are viscerally confronted with autism’s many possibilities, are given neurodivergent mechanisms through which to re-see Villette, Frankenstein, Robinson Cru soe, and more. Autism’s possibilities exceed the texts Rodas autistically scrutinizes. What Autistic Disturbances offers is at once a method and a style for appre hending aesthetic autism, across genre and mode. This is an incompara ble book, one brimming with ideas for how to reclaim autistic echoes in a morass of literary expression. Lather, rinse, repeat is an amazing thing.
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