Breaking the Rules: Autistic-Led Pedagogy in Literary Studies

‘I am an autistic academic obsessed with how the poetic rules are broken.’ Laura Brook explores a neurodiversity-inspired way to understand – and teach – poetry.

In a blog post from 2019, Caron Freeborn describes her love of the line break: ‘I am a poet obsessed with the line. I am an autistic poet, so it might be that the autistic focus drives this obsession’ (Freeborn 2019). For Freeborn, the line break is vital to understanding the meaning of a poem; throughout her piece she describes the waxing and waning of ‘pressure’ generated by the line break as it gives the poem shape and intention. Where Freeborn is an autistic poet obsessed with the poetic line, I am an autistic academic obsessed with the poetic rules. Why is this line in iambic pentameter apart from the first two words? Why are these slant rhymes? Why is this poem one or two lines too long or short to be a sonnet but still has the same rhyme scheme? Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that I am an autistic academic obsessed with how the poetic rules are broken.

Often, neurotypical readings of neurotypical texts are presented as a standard by which all literary observations in the university classroom ought to be judged: this rhyme scheme connotes romance, that line stress connotes anger. Yet, by embracing an autistic-led pedagogy, one which questions such often long-held assumptions, there is the scope for better insight into a pedagogical model which reflects the skills of neurodivergent students, as well as possessing the potential to drive greater insight into literary studies more widely. Caron Freeborn’s focus on the line break in both her work and her teaching is an excellent example of the ways in which an autistic-led approach to poetry can be beneficial to and productive for the autistic scholar. However, there remains a distinct lack of autistic-led pedagogy in literary studies, and particularly within studies of poetry. In this piece, I will argue that embracing an autistic-led approach to literary studies can benefit both autistic scholars and the wider field itself.

A multiplicity of approaches

Much work has been done in recent years to dismantle the misconception that autistic people are ill-suited to the humanities (McGrath 2017). However, the discussion about pedagogical methods in the humanities largely focuses on how best to support children, and discussions about pedagogy in higher education typically assume a neurotypical academic supporting a handful of neurodivergent students. There has been some recent progress in this area: Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al.’s paper interrogates the benefits of neurodivergent reading practices for neurodivergent academics, within what they term ‘autism/autistic fiction’ (Rosqvist, Nygren, and O’Donoghue 2024). Since I have started teaching undergraduates, it has become even clearer to me that there is a need for a pedagogical approach which balances the traditional forms of interrogating poetic texts with the multiplicity of approaches provided by neurodivergent academics.

The structural patterning of the sonnet, alongside its brevity and its capacity for exploring complex political and emotional ideas, make it an ideal pedagogical tool in teaching poetry. At a secondary-school level, the sonnet is often taught as a means of readily identifying rhyme and metre. At undergraduate level, the focus moves towards extrapolating meaning from these identifications; it is no longer enough to tell the marker that a line is iambic pentameter, but rather what the use of iambic pentameter suggests. The rule itself is not the interesting part, but rather where the rules have been broken, or changed.

One of my favourite poems to use in the classroom for this is John Keats’s Bright Star.

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

(Keats 1848, 393)

There is a great deal of insight into the poem’s themes to be gained here from a close and detailed reading. The rhyme scheme is strictly patterned as the expected abab cdcd egef gg Shakespearean sonnet, but with a surprising turn following the ‘No’ of line 9, severing the sterile natural world in the octave from the warm romance of the sestet, more akin to the Petrarchan sonnet. Why break the poem up in this way with these specific dashes, in lines 1, 8 and 9? What is the significance of features such as the religious imagery of ‘eremite’, ‘priestlike’, ‘ablution’, or the disrupted scansion of the opening two words: ‘Bright star’? Perhaps Keats is devoted to his lover with the passionate fervour of the religious monk, or perhaps the love itself is cold and sterile akin to a vow of celibacy. In his discussions with Temple Grandin, Ralph James Savarese notes that ‘as literature explores its larger themes, it, too, thinks in pictures, smells and touches’, operating in a similar manner to autistic cognition (Savarese 2018, 5). Romantic poetry distils this idea further, with its central themes inescapably tied to rich sensory images. Encouraging the asking of questions rather than reproducing a single well-established neurotypical interpretation can provide avenues for new and exciting insights into well-loved poems.

A neuroqueer augmentation of close reading

Using this approach, which questions the implications of rules being broken, is not simply a recapitulation of the detail-orientated close reading of New Criticism. In a way it can be considered an evolution; a suggestion that the ‘rules’ based close readings of New Criticism can be augmented by neuroqueer interpretations. In her blog post, Freeborn also notes: ‘that is not to say all poets interested in the line break are autists, nor that all autistic poets concern themselves deeply with line breaks’ (Freeborn 2019). This is important to emphasise; the focus on making and breaking the ‘rules’ of poetry moves beyond a straightforward identification of these features. Instead, it becomes an exploration in wondering why these decisions have been made, and what we can gain from them.

Through an autistic-led approach that focuses on these rules, we can also interrogate what ‘rules’ are in place in the wider paratextual landscape and why. This article focuses on Keats because he’s canonical, often studied in classrooms, and therefore likely familiar to readers, but would be equally productive if applied to more modern sonnets – think Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and its unconventional rhyme scheme – or poems that are only loosely sonnets, like the sixteen-lined ‘On Not Being Milton’ by Tony Harrison. By questioning why a poem or a poet has become canonical, we make explicit the biases and assumptions which are so often implicit in literary studies, and can begin to address how this intersects with other areas of marginalisation. Through embracing a variety of pedagogies in the university classroom, rather than anticipating a neurotypical ‘standard’ method of engaging with a text, all students will benefit from the freedom of interpretations according to their own strengths and worldviews.

Most of all, adopting an autistic-led approach to pedagogy in literary studies has clear benefits for neurodivergent people. In their work on the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival, Anna Stenning notes that the role of the humanities in forging a space for autistic scholars ‘allows us to articulate alternative imaginings of what it means to belong, to experience desire, identity and affiliation’ (Stenning 2020). In university tutorial settings, too often the onus is on the autistic student to arrange their opinions in a way that is deemed acceptable to a neurotypical tutor, who in turn enforces an expectation of masking or camouflaging before they are receptive to their student’s contributions. By giving autistic academics the space and resources to develop our own pedagogical methods, autistic students and staff alike are empowered to contribute to our disciplines in a way that is both beneficial to our work and authentic to ourselves.

It is also important to acknowledge that the unspoken rules of the classroom are increasingly enforced for those who are multiply marginalised. Alex Chand et al. note that ‘de-emphasising a culturally rigid set of expectations and implicit rules for judging the effectiveness of social interaction’ in this way will ultimately make institutions ‘more accessible to not only neurodivergent but also other minority groups’ (Chand, Lewis, and Stenning 2023). Whether it’s through attention to detail, the love of the line-break, the interrogation of the rules, or something else entirely, embracing autistic-led pedagogy provides students with the tools to forge their own interpretations within literary studies and, most of all, can help support neurodivergent staff and students alike reach our full potential.

With thanks to Anna Stenning and the Neurodivergent Humanities Network.

About the author

Laura Brook is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh exploring the representation of patienthood in the early nineteenth century through the life and works of John Keats. Laura can be found on Twitter @laurajbrook.

References

Chand, Alex, Rebecca Lewis, and Anna Stenning. 2023. ‘The Creativity of Autistic Students in the Arts and Humanities’. The Polyphony (blog). 27 October 2023. https://thepolyphony.org/2023/10/27/the-creativity-of-autistic-students-in-the-arts-and-humanities/.

Freeborn, Caron. 2019. ‘The Autistic Line’. Impspired (blog). 4 September 2019. https://impspired.com/2019/09/04/caron-freeborn/.

Keats, John. 1848. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Edited by Richard Monckton Milnes. New York: George P. Putnam.

McGrath, James. 2017. Naming Adult Autism: Culture, Science, Identity. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated.

Rosqvist, Hanna Bertilsdotter, Anna Nygren, and Sarinah O’Donoghue. 2024. ‘Moving Through a Textual Space Autistically’. The Journal of Medical Humanities 45 (1): 17–34.

Savarese, Ralph James. 2018. See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Stenning, Anna. 2020. ‘Shouting Above the Noise: Autistic Life Writing and the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival’. The Polyphony (blog). 18 December 2020. https://thepolyphony.org/2020/12/18/shouting-above-the-noise-autistic-life-writing-and-the-interdisciplinary-autism-research-festival/.