On his book See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor
Cover Interview of March 13, 2019
In a nutshell
Can autistic people, across the spectrum, read literary
fiction? Can they enjoy and profit from the experience? For years, experts have
said no. A “triad of impairments”—in language, social understanding, and
imagination—made literature a bad fit for the autistic brain. This population,
the logic went, was better suited to mathematical or scientific endeavors, arenas
that don’t depend on “theory of mind” or a nuanced appreciation of figurative
language. (The former involves the ability to ascertain the mental states of
others; the latter involves the ability to handle sentences like this one:
“Fiction is a moody jungle-gym of make-believe conflict.”) This view of autism
became so prevalent that a best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Nighttime, used social and metaphorical bafflement as a central
aspect of the protagonist’s characterization. My book offers a radically
opposing view. An ethnographic project involving six autistic readers, See
It Feelingly presents the rich, and sometimes richly different, responses
to literary works by people whom the medical community would describe as “impaired”
but who would describe themselves as “neurodivergent”—distinctive
neurologically. My collaborators include my son, DJ Savarese (with him I
discussed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn); Tito Mukhopadhyay (Moby-Dick);
Jamie Burke (Ceremony); Dora Raymaker (Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?); Eugenie Belkin (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter); and Temple
Grandin (two short stories from Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and
Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction). Referencing the burgeoning field of cognitive
literary studies, which asks what our brain is doing when we read literature, See
It Feelingly seeks to explore the nature of fiction’s hold on us: in
particular, its powerful emotional appeal and its ability to acquaint us with
people very different from ourselves.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Can autistic people, across the spectrum, read literary fiction? Can they enjoy and profit from the experience? For years, experts have said no. A “triad of impairments”—in language, social understanding, and imagination—made literature a bad fit for the autistic brain. This population, the logic went, was better suited to mathematical or scientific endeavors, arenas that don’t depend on “theory of mind” or a nuanced appreciation of figurative language. (The former involves the ability to ascertain the mental states of others; the latter involves the ability to handle sentences like this one: “Fiction is a moody jungle-gym of make-believe conflict.”) This view of autism became so prevalent that a best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, used social and metaphorical bafflement as a central aspect of the protagonist’s characterization. My book offers a radically opposing view. An ethnographic project involving six autistic readers, See It Feelingly presents the rich, and sometimes richly different, responses to literary works by people whom the medical community would describe as “impaired” but who would describe themselves as “neurodivergent”—distinctive neurologically. My collaborators include my son, DJ Savarese (with him I discussed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn); Tito Mukhopadhyay (Moby-Dick); Jamie Burke (Ceremony); Dora Raymaker (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); Eugenie Belkin (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter); and Temple Grandin (two short stories from Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction). Referencing the burgeoning field of cognitive literary studies, which asks what our brain is doing when we read literature, See It Feelingly seeks to explore the nature of fiction’s hold on us: in particular, its powerful emotional appeal and its ability to acquaint us with people very different from ourselves.