What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry: A Neurocosmopolitan Approach
A cocktail reception to follow. "What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry: A Neurocosmopolitan Approach," by Ralph James Savarese, Ph.D. The notion of an obdurate literality in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) persists in the scientific literature. The inability to comprehend figurative language, particularly metaphor, is often cited as a debilitating aspect of this condition. But this can line up with what might be called a poetic sensibility, and they can be exploited, with training in literature and creative writing, as enabling mechanisms of aesthetic defamiliarization. If autistics "live in the sensory," as Donna Williams puts it, and if mastering the world with meaning betrays the immediacy of their experience, then poetry might serve as a kind of neurocosmopolitan meeting place, for what is a poem but patterned language whose embodied pleasures exceed that language's symbolic or representative function?
