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Neurodiversity’S Lingua Franca?: The Wild Iris, Autobiography Of Red, And The Breakdown Of Cognitive Barriers Through Poetic Language, Dani Alexis Ryskamp

The Hilltop Review

Persons with mental and emotional disabilities, including self-advocates in the fledgling "neurodiversity" movement, often find themselves at a loss to communicate effectively with the "neurotypical," abled majority when experiences of language differ dramatically across typical and atypical populations. This paper explores the possibility of poetic language as a "lingua franca" permitting communication of neurodiverse experiences. It does so by examining examples of animism, synesthesia, and metonymy in Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red - poetic elements that also appear frequently in the writing of activists with depression, autism, and other neuroatypical conditions. I argue that, …