The Tourettic Function: Verse History and the Neurodivergent Sublime

Abstract

This essay argues that the body-mind projected by lyric reading is modeled on neurodivergence but not acknowledged as such. The idealized kinesthesia of movement disorders abstracts from disability to anthropomorphize poetry’s antinormative or “stretched” language. Tourette’s syndrome, in particular, cannot ground a coherent aesthetic will for lyric; indeed, Oliver Sacks must turn to the latter, via Nietzsche, to imagine his patients’ mastery of the disorder in the form of “kinetic melodies.” Drawing from disability studies’ critiques of cognitive models of autism, the essay suggests that the paradoxical volition and form of Tourette’s destabilizes cognitive studies of poetry. At the same time, Tourette’s reveals how historical prosody, especially metrical versification, came to appear more pathologically “ticcy.” This transformation ironically limited poetry’s accessibility for those neurodivergent subjects that poets and critics sublimely encountered as new aesthetic potential.