Book Reviews by Ajitpaul Mangat
book Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum employs a "moderated" materialism ... more book Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum employs a "moderated" materialism or social constructionist approach in interrogating how autism has been characterized in the popular imagination. Such an approach offers a corrective to dualistic frameworks that wrench apart culture and biology, ideas and materiality. Autism should, according to Loftis, be understood as always-already constituted by and in relation to cultural practices. In other words, the symbolic inscribes and produces autism. Loftis, whose work is informed by her own experience as an autistic person, begins with an account of how the media connected the killer at Sandy Hook Elementary with Asperger's Syndrome in order to provide a vivid example of the dangers of stereotyping: how our culture's obsession with and prejudice against autism spectrum disorder can negatively influence the way people think about autistic individuals. In Imagining Autism, she "examines the interrelationship of literary representations of autism, cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and disability identity politics" (2). Arguing that literary depictions of life on the spectrum remain unexamined from the standpoints of both Disability Studies and autistic culture, Loftis seeks to "examine the assumptions that underpin common literary stereotypes of people on the spectrum" as well as "explore the implications that these fictional depictions have on public perceptions of the condition" (3). As this is the first book on autism and literature, its scope is necessarily wide-ranging, extending from "before the diagnosis" to contemporary fiction, from literary characters clearly represented to those characters widely suspected to be on the spectrum, from canonical classroom staples to recent best sellers. The diversity of works examined allows Imagining Autism to illuminate not the nature and source of autism but rather the "fantastic variety," the "flexible alterity" that the term autism encompasses (2), emphasizing, thereby, "autism's place in our culture as a shifting symbol of difference" (21-22).
Books by Ajitpaul Mangat
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Book Reviews by Ajitpaul Mangat
Books by Ajitpaul Mangat