Autistic Disturbances

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.

"A rhetorically vibrant conception of autism that flourishes throughout her close readings of literary texts and her theoretical meditations on the effects of autistic poetics."
--LA Review of Books

“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

“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

Julia Miele Rodas is Professor of English, Bronx Community College, CUNY. Her website is https://juliamielerodas.com/?.