Autism and Representation [Paperback]

Autism, a neuro-developmental disability, has received wide but often sensationalistic treatment in the popular media. A great deal of clinical and medical research has been devoted to autism, but the traditional humanities disciplines and the new field of Disability Studies have yet to explore it. This volume, the first scholarly book on autism in the humanities, brings scholars from several disciplines together with adults on the autism spectrum to investigate the diverse ways that autism has been represented in novels, poems, autobiographies, films, and clinical discourses, and to explore the connections and demarcations between autistic and neurotypical creativity. Using an empathetic scholarship that unites professional rigor with experiential knowledge derived from the contributors lives with or as autistic people, the essays address such questions as: In what novel forms does autistic creativity appear, and what unusual strengths does it possess? How do autistic representations--whether by or about autistic people--revise conventional ideas of cognition, creativity, language, (dis)ability and sociability? This timely and important collection breaks new ground in literary and film criticism, aesthetics, psychology, and Disability Studies.

Autism and Representation: A Comprehensive Introduction

Mark Osteen  

I. Clinical Constructions

1. No Search, No Subject? Autism and the American Conversion Narrative

James T. Fisher

2. Bruno Bettelheim, Autism, and the Rhetoric of Scientific Authority

Katherine DeMaria Severson, James Arnt Aune, and Denise Jodlowski

3. Constructing Autism: A Brief Genealogy

Majia Holmer Nadesan

II. Autistry

4. Autism and Modernism: A Genealogical Exploration

Patrick McDonagh

5. Autism and the Imagination

Bruce Mills