See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor
Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

Literary scholars, cultural theorists, Americanists: steel yourselves to recognize, in these unmissable books by Ralph James Savarese and Melanie Yergeau, your lack of an important literacy. “Are you, dear reader,” ironizes autist professor Yergeau, channeling Jane Austen, “autistic or non-autistic? Can there ever really be any in-between?” Outside the autistic/nonautistic binary, autists (eschewing the objectivizing terminology of “autistic-as-modifier” [2]) work with “rhetorics of plasticity” to open onto “plastic futures” (133). Savarese, parent of autist poet and filmmaker DJ Savarese, shares with us his son’s pithy childhood indictment of the judgment of nonautists, a.k.a. free people, with regard to autists: “Free people treat my people, very smart people who type to communicate, as mindless.” As you read these monographs on the rich rhetorical and literary lives of autists, you may shudder to imagine yourself aligned with the skeptical Harvard experts who, as Stephen Kuusisto reminds us in his foreword to Savarese’s...