Imagining Autism

Sonya Freeman Loftis

Description

2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

A disorder that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism remains in large part a mystery, giving rise to both fear and fascination. Sonya Freeman Loftis's groundbreaking study examines literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. Imagining Autism looks at fictional characters (and an author or two) widely understood as autistic, ranging from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Harper Lee's Boo Radley to Mark Haddon's boy detective Christopher Boone and Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. The silent figure trapped inside himself, the savant made famous by his other-worldly intellect, the brilliant detective linked to the criminal mastermind by their common neurology—these characters become protean symbols, stand-ins for the chaotic forces of inspiration, contagion, and disorder. They are also part of the imagined lives of the autistic, argues Loftis, sometimes for good, sometimes threatening to undermine self-identity and the activism of the autistic community.

Introduction
1. The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy
2. The Autistic Savant: Pygmalion, Saint Joan, and the Neurodiversity Movement
3. The Autistic Victim: Of Mice and Men and Flowers for Algernon
4. The Autistic Gothic: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Glass Menagerie, and The Sound and the
Fury
5. The Autistic Child Narrator: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-Time
6. The Autistic Label: Diagnosing (and Un-Diagnosing) the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Afterword
Notes
Index

Sujets

• People with Disabilities
• Literary Criticism
• Literature
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253018137
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Imagining
AUTISM
Imagining
AUTISM
Fiction and Stereotypes on the SPECTRUM
SONYA FREEMAN LOFTIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Sonya Freeman Loftis
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Chapter 2 first appeared as The Superman on the Spectrum: Shaw s Autistic Characters and the Neurodiversity Movement in Dilemmas and Delusions: Bernard Shaw and Health, ed. Christopher Wixson, special issue, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 34 (2014): 59-74. Copyright 2014 The Pennsylvania State University. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loftis, Sonya Freeman, [date]
Imagining autism : fiction and stereotypes on the spectrum / Sonya Freeman Loftis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01800-7 (hardback : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01813-7 (ebook)
1. Autistic people in literature. 2. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 3. English fiction-History and criticism. 4. American fiction-History and criticism. 5. American drama-20th century-History and criticism. 6. English drama-20th century-History and criticism. 7. Stereotypes (Social psychology) I. Title.
PN3426.A87L64 2015
820.9 3561-dc23
2015011624
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Matt Loftis
My life started the day that I met you .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and His Legacy
2 The Autistic Savant: Pygmalion, Saint Joan , and the Neurodiversity Movement
3 The Autistic Victim: Of Mice and Men and Flowers for Algernon
4 The Autistic Gothic: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Glass Menagerie , and The Sound and the Fury
5 The Autistic Child Narrator: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
6 The Autistic Label: Diagnosing (and Undiagnosing) the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Afterword
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to those who commented on chapters in progress, including Bruce Henderson, Christopher Wixson, Linda Zatlin, Lisa Ulevich, Allison Lenhardt, and Stephanie Frankum. Special thanks to my mentor at Morehouse College, Linda Zatlin, who encouraged me to pursue disability studies in the first place. In addition to social coaching me all over campus, Linda uplifted my heart during one of the most challenging years of my life. Lisa Ulevich, wonderful friend, occasional coauthor, and brilliant thinker, has influenced my interpretation of the texts examined here more than she could possibly know. Thank you to those who provided the world s most loving childcare while I was writing, including my wonderful in-laws, Jan Loftis and April Ledford, my sister Kristen Dill Fish, and, of course, my parents. Special thanks to Yolanda Gilmore Bivins of the Atlanta University Center Library: you go above and beyond the call of librarianly duty! Finally, thanks to my wonderful students at Morehouse College: you inspire and challenge me on a daily basis.
Imagining
AUTISM
Introduction
(Behavior is communication.)
(Not being able to talk is not the same as not having anything to say.)
-Julia Bascom, Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking
Even though the stereotype of autistics is that we lack empathy, I could not sleep after I heard about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the winter of 2012. I read headlines online each morning, and, like many other people across the nation, I prayed for the families involved. Three days after the tragedy, I saw a headline connecting the killer at Sandy Hook with Asperger s syndrome. After carefully insuring that the volume was turned down low (loud noises terrify me, even when they are coming from my own computer), I clicked on the video. I covered my mouth with my hand and rocked back and forth slowly while the news clip, now turned down to a safe level, blared bad news. The media said that the Autism Research Institute had released an official statement: Our thoughts and prayers are with the community of Newtown, Connecticut. . . . The eyes of the world are on this wrenching tragedy. . . . [M]isinformation could easily trigger increased prejudice and misunderstanding. Let us all come together and mourn for the families. Because the college where I work as an assistant professor was out for the holiday, I had all day to work on a new article. Instead, I opted for the uneasy comfort of pacing around my living room. Mingled with my sorrow for the tragedy was a new fear of how the actions of one individual might influence the public perception of people on the autism spectrum.
Later, people asked me about the tragedy at Sandy Hook. If someone who uses a wheelchair committed a crime, would you ask your neighbor who also happens to use a wheelchair for insight into the psychology of the killer? Such questions oversimplistically reduce neurological difference into a universal way of thinking, as though all people on the spectrum think alike, our thoughts and personalities reduced to a mythological, biological destiny. While autistics may think differently from neurotypicals (people who do not have autism) by definition, this does not mean that people with autism are a homogeneous group with a universal psychology-far from it. Autistics display a fantastic variety of personality types, skill sets, and interests. Furthermore, the media coverage following the tragedy forwarded a stereotype of people on the spectrum as violent. There is no scientific evidence linking autism with violent crime. In fact, studies have shown that people with autism are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators: social na vet and physical signs of difference can make autistics the target of abuse and victimization. 1 The media frenzy in the winter of 2012 was a disturbing example of the dangers of stereotyping, and it had the potential to do real damage to the (already marginalized) autistic community. The media hype was only one more example of our culture s simultaneous obsession with and yet prejudice against autism spectrum disorder.
This book examines the interrelationship of literary representations of autism, cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and disability identity politics. Deconstructing cultural stereotypes of people on the spectrum and exploring autism s incredibly flexible alterity as a signifier of social and cognitive difference, this book focuses on some of our culture s most canonical responses to autism, examining the role of autism and autistic characters in modern literature. Beginning before the diagnosis in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw and extending all the way to contemporary fiction by Mark Haddon and Stieg Larsson, this book examines literary characters clearly presented as being on the autism spectrum, as well as those widely suspected by readers to be autistic. From the standard classroom staples to the best sellers of the past decade, the surprisingly frequent presence of autistic characters in popular literary works testifies to our culture s interest in cognitive difference and to the disruptive power of disabled figures in normative discourse. In a culture that has traditionally prioritized the written word, the place of literature in the cultural stories we tell about ourselves holds incredible myth-making power. And cultural stories-whether told by the news media, the literature taught in classrooms, or a television sitcom-matter. They influence the way we think about people with autism, the way we think about disabled people as a cultural minority group, and the way our society regards, values, or disvalues anyone who is different. Left critically unexamined, previously ignored from both a disability studies standpoint and in terms of autistic culture, these literary depictions of life on the spectrum are left to stand as representative of what autism is-such depictions remain unquestioned, unexplained, and unexplored. Illuminating the space between the stereotypes and the search for autistic identity (or perhaps sometimes the overlap between and the disturbing interdependence of the two), the chapters that follow examine the assumptions that underpin common literary stereotypes of people on the spectrum and explore the implications that these fictional depictions have on public perceptions of the condition. I hope that this book, as the first book on autism and literature, will contribute to increased attention to our society s many fictional depictions of mental disorders, encourage an increased understanding and acceptance of neurological difference, and help to bring mental disorders into the field of disability studies. 2
Disorder versus Diversity: Autism and Autistic Culture
Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the disability rights movement and disability studies have had a growing presence in both popular culture and academia; however, people with