Autistic Readers of Literary Narrative: A Cognitive Aesthetics Approach

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This project will aim to address the following question: how do adult autistic readers process literary narrative texts? Previous autism research has explored extensively the narrative abilities of autistic individuals, in both comprehension and production (Broc et al., 2021. However, much of this research has often focused only on simple, and very rarely literary, narratives.In general, this study seeks to address the following subsidiary questions:1. What difficulties and advantages do autistic readers possess in literary narrative processing and its enjoyment compared to neurotypical readers? 2. What specific affordances do literary narrative texts offer to autistic readers? 3. Are there ways of improving some autistic individuals' ability to process, and overall engage with, literary narratives?4. Can the insights generated from this study also benefit other neurodivergent communities?Whereas literary criticism has examined the fictional representation of characters with autism (Rodas, 2018), empirical literary studies have solely focused on neurotypical readers (e.g. Jacobs, 2015). Autism research surrounding narrative processing, on the other hand, has often relied upon small, simple fictional narratives, often produced by the experimenter, or reused from previous experiments, to report on the narrative skills of autistic individuals (Colle et al., 2008). Studies have also largely focused on 'deficit' characterisations of autism in narrative processing, rather than on advantages (Broc et al., 2021). Working between both literary studies and cognitive psychology, this study will aim to conceptualise the relationship between autism and literary narrative reading, using data generated from experimental work in related areas to support its arguments. As part of its rationale, it will also concentrate on autistic adults (without additional impairments in language or intellectual ability), since children are more frequently studied cases (e.g. Ferretti et al., 2018). Adopting this rationale will be appropriate for the presumed type of autistic reader this study considers, with basic levels of literacy and reading abilities. An extensive corpus of narrative literary texts produced by non-autistic writers will be used for this study. As an innovation in autism research, these texts will cover a diverse range of historical and cultural periods, spanning from nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction to contemporary fiction. In using this corpus, I will analyse a range of literary narrative text features, including, for example, aspects of narrative style, structure, and technique, and formal experimentation. I will relate these features to a variety of observed features typically understood as more difficult for autistic individuals than others, including theory of mind, metaphorical language processing, and imagination (Broc et al., 2021). I will also explore the possibility that adult autistic readers may possess advantages over neurotypical readers in processing these features, based on recent suggestions in autism narrative research (for anecdotal evidence, see Maróthi, Csigó and Kéri, 2019), and furthermore, wider attempts in autism research to provide positive characterisations of autism and identify processing strengths (Russell et al., 2019).Following from this analysis, I will investigate how literary narrative texts can be suited to the processing strengths of adult autistic readers, to the extent that they relate to these difficulties and advantages. I will consider whether literary narrative texts can benefit adult autistic readers by increasing narrative skills and facilitating better social understanding between autism and neurotypical readers (Chapple et al., 2021). An additional goal of this study will be to examine whether there are gender-based differences in literary narrative processing, since it is currently acknowledged that autism may present differently in females (Halladay et al.,2)