Since the 1940s researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people's limited ability to understand figurative language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literary fiction. In his new book See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press 2018), Ralph James Savarese challenges this view. Discussing fictional works over a period of years with people from across the autism spectrum (including Temple Grandin), he provides evidence of “disability gain.” His collaborators’ often startling insights emerged not only from their experiences of stigma and exclusion but also from the way that their different bodies and brains lined up with a story. For example, Tito Mukhopadhyay, whom the medical community would describe as “severely autistic,” found in Moby-Dick a similarly nonspeaking yet intelligent creature, one hunted as mercilessly as scientists now hunt for an autism cure. To him, Melville’s descriptions of the whale’s watery habitat and of the masthead watchman’s swaying perch high above the deck evoked autism’s alternative sensing—its overwhelmingly immediate, which is to say non-cognitive nature. Relying on work in critical autism studies, cognitive literary studies, and contemporary neuroscience, the talk will present an ethnographical portrait of one autistic reader.
Professor Savarese teaches American literature, disability studies, medical humanities, and creative writing at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Co-Sponsored by UVa's Disability Studies Initiative, Department of English, and Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures.