Many disability rights campaigners have promoted self-advocacy, noting that the voices of people with disabilities should be considered for telling their own stories. However, this argument for semi-autobiographical reflection is complicated when one considers how the rights, preferences and stories of people with nonverbal autism, as one example, can be articulated.

Claremont Graduate University

Writers have attempted to portray cognitive difference in the novel many times, typically by way of narration. One famous example is found in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. The first section is narrated by a character many call "an idiot" and Faulkner himself called this a failure. This highlights one of many issues with writing from the perspective of those with cognitive difference- the difficulty or else impossibility of doing so when one is not cognitively different themselves.

Cognitive Difference and Narrative

Hall, A. (2016). Literature and disability (Ser. Literature and contemporary thought). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Literature and Disability

Despite the fact that cognitive difference is employed fairly frequently in literature, it is very rarely analyzed by disability studies scholars. This is part of a larger trend wherein cognitive difference is often avoided as a subject of discussion in disability studies just as, some would note, cognitively and neurologically different individuals are often ignored in everyday life.

Lack of Analysis of Cognitive Difference and Narrative

The Argument for Self-Advocacy in Cognitively Different Stories

Disability studies academics and writers have argued that authors such as William Faulkner and Mark Haddon show the inner thoughts and feelings of a cognitively different character as a ploy to obtain shock or sympathy from readers. In such cases, the cognitively different are little more than a tool for the author.

Cognitive Difference in Narrative for Shock or Sympathy

More recent novels, such as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, employs an autistic character as a metaphor for isolation and difference that depicts autism or "asperger's" in a blended, inaccurate way. Despite this, the book received critical acclaim- a testament to how accepted such employments of cognitive difference are.

Autism as Metaphor in Fiction

More recently, there has been an increase in "autie-biographies"- novels or autobiographies narrated and written by autistic individuals. These novels defy earlier conceptions of autism as the medical and psychiatric schools once proclaimed that autistic individuals had no inner monologue, thoughts, or feelings beyond the external. One example of an own voices book such as this is Naoki Higashida's "The Reason I Jump".

Autie-biographies and Own Voices Autism Stories

Depictions of cognitive difference in fiction evolve in accordance with the prevailing views and attitudes of the time period, often moving in only a slightly more radical direction, if at all. For example, when William Faulkner wrote *The Sound and the Fury*, "idiot" was a legitimate term and most mental or neurological disabilities were grouped together. Consequently, his story did not require a specific diagnosis beyond that term nor additional medical details.

Learn Before

Related