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
6. Fractioned Idiom: Poetry and the Language of Autism
Kristina Chew
7. Imagination and Awareness of Self in Autistic Spectrum Poets
Ilona Roth
8. Human, but More So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us about the Process of Narrative Matthew K. Belmonte
III. Autist Biography
9. Crossing Over: Writing the Autistic Memoir
Debra Cumberland
10. (M)Othering and Autism: Maternal Rhetorics of Self-Revision
Sheryl Stevenson
11. Urinetown: A Chronicle of the Potty Wars
Mark Osteen
IV. Popular Representations
12. Recognizing Jake: Contending with Formulaic and Spectacularized Representations of Autism in Film
Anthony D. Baker
13. Hollywood and the Fascination of Autism
Stuart Murray
14. Film as a Vehicle for Raising Consciousness among Autistic Peers
Phil Schwarz
15. Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon's Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum James Berger 425
16. Mark Haddon's Popularity and Other Curious Incidents in My Life as an Autistic
Gyasi Burks-Abbott
Conclusion: Toward an Empathetic Scholarship
Mark Osteen
Contributors
Index
