Neurodivergence, as a socially constructed category denoting neurocognitive nonnormativity, is “a way of being a person that comes from institutional practices of diagnosis and medicalisation but [...] also involves the production of knowledge about what it means to be particular kind of person” (Anna Stenning and Hanna Bertilsdottir Rosqvist, “Neurodiversity studies: mapping out possibilities of a new critical paradigm”). What can a neurodivergent lens reveal in comparative literature, and what can literary texts tell us about neurodivergence as a social construct or embodied experience? Moreover—borrowing from Nick Walker’s  Neuroqueer Heresies—if literary scholars collectively work to drop “the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity” (155) and instead participate in “embodied expression of neurodivergence” (153), what creative horizons appear? 

With these questions as a point of departure, this seminar aims to foster an intellectual community focused on neurodivergent creative processes, identities, representation, and engagement. We will cultivate a space valuing participants’ authentic forms of expression, processing, and self-regulation. Papers may explore unconventional formats and consider a broad variety of literary production, including film and media, narrative journalism and creative nonfiction, and life-writing. Examples of topics of interest include: cultural and linguistic dimensions of neurodivergence; intersectional identities and queerness; aesthetic and rhetorical strategies; selfhood and narrative; neurodivergent reading, writing, and translating practices; neuroqueering the spaces of literary studies (classrooms, conferences, publication forums).