Autistic narratives unfold under the dueling pressures of diagnostic and literary expectation. The diagnostic expectation holds autism to be a life-long proposition: either a permanent disorder that may be ameliorated but never dissipated or a distinctive mode of being that should never be dissipated but must be accommodated. The literary expectation—set by the mass audience for auto-biographies and the hortatory tradition of disability writing—is that autistic protagonists will conquer the adversity of their the condition and achieve something like a “recovery.” This lecture explores how the tension between these disciplinary imperatives structures current autistic memoirs.

UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, Joseph is the author of James Joyce and the Problem of Justice; Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood; and The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture. He has edited or coedited several collections, including Quare Joyce, Urban Ireland, Yeats and Afterwords, and Ireland in Psychoanalysis. He is now completing Unseeing the Unspeakable: Child Sex Scandal in Irish Literature (with Margot Backus). His current project is entitled “Exceptions to Themselves: Autism and Moral Authority in Modern Literature.”

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our eighth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community – with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to the public.