Literalism and Autism

[GrandizerII]

For example, would someone with ASD have access to the pleasure in the non-literal reading of, say, Proust or Dostoevsky? This is not a matter of decoding metaphor so much as of applying very subtle fictional nuances to one's own experience. Unreliable narrators like Proust's, for example, demand that we look beyond his words to figure out what's really going on -- even though, since it's fiction, nothing is really going on.

Not me personally. I don't know about others on the spectrum though.

Likewise in poetry, which may or may not use non-literal tropes but certainly demands sympathetic readings of vaguely hinted information.

Again, not me personally. I for one find poetry really boring to get into, generally speaking. Psalms are like the worst part of the Bible for me. But even with poetry in general, I've never been able to get into them the way I'd get into a a fantasy story in prose form. There are exceptions of course (like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey).

I've been trying to remember if I ever encountered anyone who was both strongly anti-religion and also aesthetically enthralled by good fiction. Not stuff that makes you say "COOL!" like, say, good science fiction, but the classic novels where the act of reading them is a wonderful personal experience. Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, George Eliot, Henry James, etc. etc.

Does enjoying the stories in Genesis and the Greek and Norse myths count? I guess I need to know what you mean by "anti-religion".

My experience has been that people who are deeply into the arts (and again, not popular media but the stuff that snobs like) tend not to have animosity toward religion. Atheists like Umberto Eco or Harold Bloom, for example, who are fantastically knowledgable about literature, tend not to avoid religious themes in their favorite books or in what they write. Bloom was raised strongly Jewish and became an atheist, but says "make Dante your textbook."

Well, if it helps, I've written a portion of a story that I've never completed that had a bit of religious/spiritual imagery in it, but I'm not one who is deeply into the arts. I like some arts but am not crazy about them.