Autistic Disturbances:

Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe

Julia Miele Rodas

This monograph project looks at the cultural, critical, and clinical history of autism to explore an idea of literary autism, arguing that many qualities of autistic voice are present in a diverse array of literary and popular texts. Central to this deliberately autism-positive project is the idea that autism ought not to be understood as uniformly or dominantly silent, but rather that autism has distinctive verbal styles, emerging not only as a feature of embodied personality, but also as significant narrative, rhetorical, semiotic, and discursive elements in many “mainstream” texts. Indeed, autism has a manner of speaking that ought not be reduced to pathology, but which deserves authentic aesthetic and social engagement. The project title is an ironic echo of Leo Kanner’s seminal article—“Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact”—and like that piece, it investigates eleven “cases,” exploring the ways in which autism asserts itself in canonical novels like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, in modernist writing by Georges Perec and Andy Warhol, even in nonliterary texts like Martha Stewart Living and the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). 

The book is structured in three parts.

Part One—"Furthering a Theory of Autism Poetics"—presents a complex context for the project. It explains the cultural and clinical history of autistic language, discusses the problem of defining autism, examines the crucial entanglement between clinical and cultural notions of autism, troubles the role of autism autobiography in defining autistic voice, offers a theoretical grounding in autism studies, and provides an overview of Part Two (a theory of autism poetics) and Part Three (the literary case studies).

Part Two—"Articulations: Theorizing Literary Autism"—is grounded in existing literary and clinical studies of autistic voice (including studies by autistic thinkers) and teases from this literature shared ideas regarding autistic verbalization. It then recomposes these ideas into a set of larger abstract categories that constitute a kind of autistic literary fingerprint. Both leaning into and troubling dominant thinking about autistic speaking, like "echolalia," these five key categories—ricochet, apostrophe, ejaculation, discretion, and invention (in addition to autistic silence)—frame explorations both of the ways autism speaks and of the covalent listening and nonlistening that have shaped clinical and cultural constructs of autism.

Part Three is comprised of eleven short "case studies" that explore the complexities of autistic voice in familiar texts not typically associated with autism. Open to the range of autism possibilities in each text, the purpose of these individual studies is not to argue that the writers of these texts are or were autistic, but rather to encourage readers to rethink what they know, both about these texts and about autism speaking. 

• Case one—DSM-5 (2013) [a version of this piece appeared in Social Text: Periscope]
• Case two—Martha Stewart Living (1990)
• Case three—The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975)
• Case four—Georges Perec’s “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and the Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (1974)
• Case five—J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951)
• Case six—Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884)
• Case seven—Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853)
• Case eight—absent text (the fictional Memorial of Mr. Dick [Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, 1850]; and, a non-reading of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” [1853])
• Case nine—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
• Case ten—Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
• Case eleven—Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)

The theoretical articulation of autism poetics and the various studies included in "Autistic Disturbances" all work to support this central supposition: that autism not only speaks, but also that it speaks in a voice more familiar and more highly valued than is generally supposed.

Some pieces of this project

have also been presented as talks