Representing Autism Culture, Narrative, Fascination

by Murray, Stuart

• ISBN13: 9781846310911
• ISBN10: 1846310911
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-01
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Stuart Murray is senior lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. Since the diagnosis of his youngest son with autism in 2002 he has focused increasingly on disability studies.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. ix
Permissions	p. xi
Preface: questions	p. xiii
Introduction: autism and narrative	p. 1
Presences: autistic difference	p. 27
Idiots and savants	p. 65
Witnessing	p. 104
Boys and girls, men and women	p. 139
In our time: families and sentiments	p. 168
Conclusion: causing/curing/caring	p. 207
Acknowledgements	p. 214
Select bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 224
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