Open AccessReview of Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe, Julia Miele Rodas (2018)
Author(s) -
Anna Williams
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
canadian journal of disability studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1929-9192
DOI - 10.15353/cjds.v9i5.708
Subject(s) - poetics , autism , praxis , suspect , psychology , psychoanalysis , meaning (existential) , sociology , aesthetics , poetry , developmental psychology , epistemology , philosophy , linguistics , psychotherapist , criminology
Julia Miele Rodas offers Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe as a tome of resistant literary praxis. So that we might allow ‘disordered’ to claim poetic voice- that we might recognize the celebration of this voice in our culturally treasured texts, and rather than require retroactive diagnosis, we simply allow these voices to be recognized as worthy- and Autistic. At last, a text which explores autistic language: allowing for its ironies without claiming it to be paradoxical; giving shape to its cultural consistencies without constraining it to a pathologized rigidity; allowing for both meaning where a reader might suspect none and none where a reader might insist on inserting one; and all while refusing to stigmatize, pathologize, medicalize, problematize, or even to diagnose.