Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (Liverpool University Press - Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and So)
Stuart Murray
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 184631092X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From concerns of an 'autism epidemic' to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. Representing Autism is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. Representing Autism analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.
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Autistic presence. Bartleby’s key action in the story is to assert his preference. When first asked to come into the narrator’s office to help examine a document, ‘in a singularly mild, firm voice’ he replies simply: ‘I would prefer not to’ (p. 20). It is a phrase he repeats, with slight changes, some twenty-two times throughout the story, his final act of preference being to decline an offer of food at the Halls of Justice (p. 44), after which he seemingly wastes away to his death. Bartleby’s.
P. 8. 64 Robert S. Levine, ‘Introduction’, in Robert S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Com panion to Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3. 65 There are parallels here with Ato Quayson’s reflections on the idea of disability as a hermeneutical impasse. See his Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 49–50. 66 Wyn Kelly, Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New.
Cultural states, repeat themselves time and again across texts in which we specifically see an ‘autistic idiot’ being presented. In this way, we can look from Joseph Conrad to Anita Desai, or from Virginia Woolf to Keri Hulme, with numerous instances in between, for examples where specific notions of ‘autistic idiocy’ are mobilized. These are not, of course, all of the same degree. Cultural texts dip into disability as often as they see fit, selecting aspects of this condition or that as.
The Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 147–73. For an account of the relationship between disability and New Zealand culture in Hulme, see Clare Barker, ‘From narrative prosthesis to disability counternarrative: reading the politics of difference in Potiki and the bone people’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 24, no. 1 (2006), pp. 130–47. Halliwell, Images of Idiocy, p. 215. See Halliwell, Images of Idiocy, pp. 222–4. See also Winston Groom, Forrest.
That commercial cinema would find irresistible. Coming towards the end of the 1980s, the success of Rain Man prompted a breakthrough into a wide public consciousness precisely because of the increased sense of context given to autism during the decade, but the film’s impact also provided a specific development in terms of a disability film narrative, with a new avenue for a particular ‘commercial aesthetic’ of the kind Maltby describes. From the 1990s to the present there have been numerous.