Contemporary Authors

Sonya Loftis

Assistant Professor
of English

Sonya Freeman Loftis is an assistant professor specializing in Shakespeare and disability studies. She is the author of two monographs: Shakespeare’s Surrogates (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Imagining Autism (Indiana University Press, 2015). Her work on drama and disability has appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Disability Studies Quarterly, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, The South Atlantic Review, and Text & Presentation.

Education
Ph.D. in English, University of Georgia

B.A. in English, North Georgia College and State University

Books:
Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Shakespeare’s Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Articles:
“The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy.” Disability Studies Quarterly 34.4 (2014).

“The Superman on the Spectrum: Shaw’s Autistic Characters and the Neurodiversity Movement.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 34 (2014): 59-74.

“Obsession/Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare.” Co-author, Lisa Ulevich. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. New York: Routledge, 2014. 58-75.

“Reconstructing the Bower of Bliss: Homoerotic Myth-Making in The Faerie Queene.” Renaissance Papers (2012): 1-12.

“Restructuring Marlowe: Images of the Body in Brecht’s Edward II.” The Brecht Yearbook 37 (2012): 22-39.

“A Less than Original Screenplay: Bernard Shaw’s Influence on Shakespeare in Love.”
South Atlantic Review 76.3 (2011): 111-127.

“Death, Horror, and Darkness: O’Connor’s Gothic Novel on Screen.” Wise Blood: A
Re-Consideration. Ed. John J. Han. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2011. 389-404.

“Mary Pickford as Shakespearean Shrew: Redefining the Image of America’s Sweetheart.” Shakespeare Bulletin 28.3 (2010): 313-327.

“Attacking the Canon through the Corpse: Cannibalism and Surrogation in Hamletmachine.” Text & Presentation 6 (2009): 81-93.

“Shakespeare, Shotover, Surrogation: ‘Blaming the Bard’ in Heartbreak House.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 29 (2009): 50-65.

“The Suicide of Lavinia: Finding Rome in Titus Andronicus.” Renaissance Papers (2007): 111-123.

Contact
Brawley Hall, Room 114
ext. 3611
sloftis@morehouse.edu

Sonya Freeman Loftis Goodreads Author
Member SinceOctober 2015
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Sonya Freeman Loftis is an associate professor of Shakespeare at Morehouse College. Her work on autism is strongly influenced by her personal experiences as an autistic, while her work on Shakespeare is inspired by—well, her deep and abiding and unyielding and boundless passion for Shakespeare. In 2015, chapter three of Imagining Autism received honorable mention for the Society for Disability Studies Irving K. Zola Award for “best emerging scholar in the field of disability studies.” Sonya is also a wife and mother. Her husband is not jealous when she says that Shakespeare is “the light of her life.”

Hellal on Loftis, 'Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum'

Author:
Sonya Freeman Loftis
Reviewer:
Paula Hellal

Sonya Freeman Loftis. Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 208 pp. $28.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-01800-7.

Reviewed by Paula Hellal (Birkbeck University of London)
Published on H-Disability (April, 2017)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

This is an interesting book that takes as its focus fictional characters commonly considered to be on the autism spectrum. The author, Sonya Freeman Loftis, hopes her work will “encourage an increased understanding and acceptance of neurological difference, and help to bring mental disorders into the field of disability studies” (p. 3). While making no claim that the characters she has chosen to discuss are in any way exhaustive, she has tried to represent the full diversity of the autism spectrum. Freeman Loftis begins with a consideration of Sherlock Holmes, both as invented by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and as later depicted on the screen. She uses her analysis of Holmes to introduce some of the book’s main themes: how individuals with autism are depicted as mysterious, emotionless savants; their genius a feature of their atypical mind; and the often-proposed link between criminality and mental disorders. The author considers contemporary fictional “autistic” detectives from the television programs Criminal Minds and Bones. She points out that although these detectives might be considered positive depictions of the autistic condition, they serve to perpetuate negative stereotypes, as, like Holmes, they are cold and emotionless and share many features with the criminals they are pursuing.

In chapter 2, Freeman Loftis turns her attention to George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and two of his characters, Saint Joan and Henry Higgins. Here, she elaborates on her thesis--introduced in her analysis of Holmes--that what, on a surface reading, appears to be a positive representation of autism actually serves to reaffirm damaging perceptions. Holmes, Reid, Saint Joan, and Henry Higgins reinforce the erroneous belief that everyone on the spectrum is both a genius (be that mathematical, artistic, musical) and an emotionally cold thinking machine. While the medical model of disability sees autism as an impairment or deficit, these fictional representations portray the condition in terms of “fantastic excess,” with their genius a form of “compensation cure” (p. 59). For the majority of individuals with autism without savant abilities, this representation fails to give a meaningful portrayal of the difficulties and realities that they face.

In chapter 3, Freeman Loftis looks at characters in two influential novels, Of Mice and Men (1937) and Flowers for Algernon (1966). Her stated aim is to examine how fiction and reality influence each other with respect to autism. While Lennie in Of Mice and Men is not usually considered to be on the autism spectrum, Freeman Loftis points to his special interest, social naivety, trusting nature, intellectual disability, stimming, and hypersensitivity to touch. Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon is shown first as severely learning disabled and then, following his “cure,” as a highly intelligent and emotionless autistic savant. The author uses the chapter to highlight other major themes: how learning disability in literature has frequently been linked with sexual violence; the divisions between “low” and “high” functioning autism and what she terms the “cultural connection between autism and death” (p. 20). She considers how literary depictions of autism or learning disability in which the condition “destroys” families might influence societal response to real-life tragedies in which parents kill their autistic children.

In the following chapter, Freeman Loftis elaborates on the theme of the disruption to the family in her discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), The Glass Menagerie (1944), and The Sound and the Fury (1929), arguing that To Kill a Mockingbird portrays autism as “mysterious, dangerous and supernatural” (p. 87). Arthur Radley, the reclusive central character in To Kill a Mockingbird, with his unusual body language, minimal speech, and intense sensory sensitivity, is often considered autistic. Freeman Loftis comments that Laura in Tennessee Williams’s (1911-83) play The Glass Menagerie is presented “as a burden to her neurotypical family” whose physical disability can be named and spoken of (albeit unwillingly by the mother), but her autism is subject to taboo (p. 95). The condition is the “invisible disability that has no name and cannot be articulated” (p. 97). Laura’s failure to overcome her autism is portrayed as a weakness that ultimately destroys her family.

In chapter 5, Freeman Loftis turns her attention to child narrators with her analysis of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). While there is no diagnosis of Oskar as autistic in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he is portrayed in the film adaptation as having stereotypical features of the condition. The author is disparaging: “the film’s presentation of Asperger’s as a matter of cowardice and weakness is a false and damaging one … [its] ultimate message seems to be that AS can be overcome through courage, that Oskar’s adventures in the film have ‘cured’ his sensory issues, and that his father’s love has enable him to overcome his disability” (p. 116). Christopher, in The Curious Incident, identifies with Sherlock Holmes, a seemingly a powerful and positive role model for him. However, as Freeman Loftis points out, this presentation is a parody of the autistic detective tradition. The boy detectives are shown to lack the vital understanding of human relationships and emotions.

In chapter 6, Freeman Loftis discusses The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005). Although Lisbeth is not given a definitive diagnosis in the books, she is considered by many readers to have Asperger’s syndrome and is described as being emotionless, supernatural, an alien, and a puzzle. As with other characters discussed by Freeman Loftis, Lisbeth’s savant abilities contribute to societal perception that everyone on the spectrum has extraordinary skills that are a compensation for their disability. Freeman Loftis describes how the book’s author, Stieg Larsson (1954-2004), uses his character to draw attention to problems in the Swedish mental health care system. She highlights the contradiction at the heart of the trilogy: while ostensibly a critical depiction of mental health care, the books reinforce stereotypes and stigmas around mental disorders by ultimately redefining their central autistic heroine: “In the end, the novels are only able to redeem Lisbeth and offer her triumph by denying, erasing, and silencing the narrative about mental disorders and social injustice that they initially espouse” (p. 131).

Given current fascination with autism, this book is a timely work. As literature reflects and shapes cultural attitudes, characters deemed to have autism can reflect or alter public perception of the condition. The books selected enable Freeman Loftis to show how stereotypes and prejudices around autism have subtly altered over time. For example, the fear of excessive, violent sexuality in the cognitively impaired has faded while cold, sexless, emotionless savants solving crimes through pure reason now take center stage. Other themes discussed include the depiction of autism as a tragedy, at least if unaccompanied by savant skills; the filter of unusual minds through the neurotypical (Holmes described by Watson, Lisbeth by how other characters relate to her); and autism as the destroyer of family relationships. Freeman Loftis touches upon how some of these characters have been discussed by individuals within the autistic community (this reader would have liked to have learned more on this). It is to be hoped that this engrossing book will encourage discussion and further work about fictional characters portrayed as autistic, even if not labeled as such. It is a book that will be of value to everyone interested in neurodiversity and the dangers of stereotyping. It should also appeal to anyone who wants a different perspective on a favorite character. It is highly recommended reading.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48222

Citation: Paula Hellal. Review of Loftis, Sonya Freeman, Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. April, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48222

Vol 36, No 4 (2016) > Mangat
Loftis, Sonya Freeman Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 208 pgs. ISBN-10: 0253018005.

Reviewed by Ajitpaul Mangat, ajitpaul@buffalo.edu

Sonya Freeman Loftis' book Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum employs a "moderated" materialism or social constructionist approach in interrogating how autism has been characterized in the popular imagination. Such an approach offers a corrective to dualistic frameworks that wrench apart culture and biology, ideas and materiality. Autism should, according to Loftis, be understood as always-already constituted by and in relation to cultural practices. In other words, the symbolic inscribes and produces autism. Loftis, whose work is informed by her own experience as an autistic person, begins with an account of how the media connected the killer at Sandy Hook Elementary with Asperger's Syndrome in order to provide a vivid example of the dangers of stereotyping: how our culture's obsession with and prejudice against autism spectrum disorder can negatively influence the way people think about autistic individuals. In Imagining Autism, she "examines the interrelationship of literary representations of autism, cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and disability identity politics" (2). Arguing that literary depictions of life on the spectrum remain unexamined from the standpoints of both Disability Studies and autistic culture, Loftis seeks to "examine the assumptions that underpin common literary stereotypes of people on the spectrum" as well as "explore the implications that these fictional depictions have on public perceptions of the condition" (3). As this is the first book on autism and literature, its scope is necessarily wide-ranging, extending from "before the diagnosis" to contemporary fiction, from literary characters clearly represented to those characters widely suspected to be on the spectrum, from canonical classroom staples to recent best sellers. The diversity of works examined allows Imagining Autism to illuminate not the nature and source of autism but rather the "fantastic variety," the "flexible alterity" that the term autism encompasses (2), emphasizing, thereby, "autism's place in our culture as a shifting symbol of difference" (21-22).

The chapters in Imagining Autism move roughly chronologically and are grouped thematically around literary characters that express a common stereotype about autistic individuals: from unfeeling detectives and genius savants to victims of filicide and social outcasts and outsiders. Loftis primarily concerns herself with illuminating the space, overlap, and interdependence between cultural stereotypes of people on the spectrum and the search for autistic identity. She examines how "these metaphors imagine autism as a condition that is separable from the autistic person […rendering] the person with autism passive" (16). In emphasizing the gap between the literary and the nonliterary, fiction and reality, Loftis' work engages with debates concerning the compatibility of Disability Studies and literary studies. During a particular moment in Disability Studies, scholars like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Tobin Siebers critiqued literary representations of disability for failing to represent the actual lived experience of disabled individuals. Mitchell and Snyder, for instance, suggested that narrative, rather than highlighting the social and political dimensions of disability, often employed disability as a metaphor, as a "narrative prosthesis," that is, as a "crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representative power, disruptive potential, and analytical insight" (49). Placing her work within this lineage, Loftis worries that the "seemingly inexplicable or ineffable nature of the [autistic] condition has made its metaphorical uses in our society particularly charged" (16). In Chapter 5, "The Autistic Child Narrator: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," Jonathan Safran Foer and Mark Haddon are critiqued for offering their child narrators – Oskar Schell and Christopher Boone, respectively – as metaphors for larger social concerns. Oskar's struggle to communicate symbolizes the "cultural trauma surrounding 9/11;" Christopher stands in for "cultural anxieties regarding the instability of the postmodern family" (108). While the perpetuation of negative metaphors regarding individuals on the spectrum should certainly be criticized, Loftis does not adequately theorize the use of metaphor to describe autism, failing to engage with more recent work on this important tension. Michael Bérubé argues that Disability Studies' suggestion to not read the representation of disability as figural threatens to make it "incompatible with the enterprise of professional literary studies, dedicated as so much of it is to the interpretation of the figural" ("Disability and Narrative," 570). 1 In response, James Berger has posited readings of fictional portrayals of characters and ideological directions of texts that "overall are far more multivalent than straightforward disability analyses would seem to allow" (152). Critiquing all depictions of autism that signify something other than itself prevents Loftis from considering what the study of autism in literature brings to the discipline of literary criticism.

The cultural stereotype that garners the most attention in Imagining Autism is that of the detective figure with autistic traits. Loftis convincingly traces a long-standing "autistic detective tradition" by examining Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous tales about Sherlock Holmes (as well as later adaptations of these stories for film and television), Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, and the television series Criminal Minds and Bones. In Chapter 1, "The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and His Legacy," Loftis reveals the potentially dehumanizing stereotypes that such detective heroes may perpetuate about autistic individuals. Her analysis of Holmes emphasizes that the reader's understanding of him is filtered through his "neurotypical" sidekick Watson: while Holmes may not be autistic, Watson certainly perceives him to be autistic. Indeed, for Loftis, Watson places the reader in the default neurotypical position by "[mirroring] the assumed norm of the majority perspective in society at large" (25). By perceiving Holmes to have intense interests, lack social skills, and a display of unusual body language, Watson presents Holmes in ways that perpetuates negative stereotypes about autistic difference: not only as a machine incapable of emotion but also as a "puzzle" or "mystery" to be solved by neurotypicals. In her reading of the characters Spencer Reid and Temperance Brennan from Criminal Minds and Bones, respectively, Loftis argues that their autistic traits, which perpetuate these same negative stereotypes, can be traced back to Holmes. Although autistic detectives may seem to affirmatively work for law and order, they are depicted as existing in an ambiguously liminal position with respect to criminality by virtue of the potential danger manifesting in their unusual minds: Reid is depicted as sharing a common neurological makeup with the criminals he pursues, while Brennan is shown to possess the intelligence and interest in crime needed to be a dangerous criminal.

In tracing this autistic detective tradition – indeed, throughout Imagining Autism – Loftis gazes backward from a contemporary perspective. As such, depictions of characters whether in literature from "before the diagnosis" or in contemporary fiction are uniformly criticized for conforming to a plethora of stereotypes that have only emerged during recent decades and years. While it is certainly important to interrogate the ways in which the depiction of characters from literary history can shape and influence contemporary perceptions of people on the spectrum, painting such a wide canvas with a narrowly contemporary brush does threaten at times to erase important historical nuance. Examining the stereotype that autistic individuals are more likely to be victims of filicide in Chapter 3, "The Autistic Victim: Of Mice and Men and Flowers for Algernon," Loftis convincingly argues that the depictions of Lennie Small and Charlie Gordon reveal cultural assumptions that devalue disability and thereby connect it with notions of killing and curing. As she explains, Lennie and Charlie conform to cultural stereotypes relating to both intellectual and cognitive disability. Lennie is represented as "unusually large, animal like, mechanical, clumsy, and symbolically deprived of 'freewill and rationality'" as well as connected with animals (65); Charlie is represented as, on the one hand, "a child worthy of pity" and, on the other hand, "egocentric, didactic, and unempathetic" (71). Since much work remains to be done on the historical refinement of the general category of "idiocy" into autism, it is disappointing that Loftis does not attempt to untangle the workings of such representations. Instead, by the end of the chapter, each character has been reduced to a representation of contemporary cultural myths relating to autism, curing, and killing.

In Chapter 4, "The Autistic Gothic: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Glass Menagerie, and The Sound and the Fury, " Loftis examines the stereotype of the autistic individual as isolated, that is, as trapped within an imprisoning interiority and unable to communicate with the outside world. For her, the Gothic mode proves an ideal genre to emphasize the monstrosity of autistic characters, who either pull together or tear apart the family unit. In making this claim, Loftis differentiates between Arthur "Boo" Radley, Laura Wingfield, and Benjy Compson: where these former two characters are read as having Asperger's syndrome, Benjy is read as having autistic traits. While Loftis admits that these diagnoses are anachronistic, she does not explore the historical framework of cultural practices and institutions that allowed autism and later Asperger's syndrome to be identified and interpreted as distinct psychiatric disorders. Patrick McDonagh has, for instance, taken up this challenge, arguing that "the capacity to perceive autism in the 1940s may be connected to the proliferation of modern, and modernist, notions of the self, which were given shape in the literary works of the era" (101-102). Reading Imagining Autism, thereby, often left me asking the question of why, if literature plays as large a role as Loftis argues, the articulation of autism had to initially happen through a fictional discourse rather than a scientific discourse.

Imagining Autism is at its most interesting and challenging when considering the workings of autistic culture. The very helpful Introduction outlines some of the contemporary debates within the autistic community regarding terminology and language, labels and naming. Citing the rise of online communities for autistics as allowing for the creation of an original and distinctive language, Loftis suggests that the powerful term "neurotypical" (NT) "destabilizes common conceptions of what is considered 'normal'" (8). Chapter 2, "The Autistic Savant: Pygmalion, Saint John, and the Neurodiversity Movement," extends her consideration of this political act of (re)naming to the main focus of her book: stereotypes. She writes that "[i]t is not surprising that people on the autism spectrum have banded together to oppose and rewrite negative stereotypes perpetuated by the majority culture" (18). Exploring the pervasive stereotype connecting genius with autism, Loftis considers how the autistic community has claimed the figure of George Bernard Shaw, who can be seen as a kind of literary savant, as a positive role model. Analyzing a 2011 discussion thread on "Wrong Plant" about a quotation from Shaw's Man and Superman, Loftis suggests that, while claiming Shaw may seem to present autistic identity in a positive light, it "perpetuates the savant stereotype" (59). Provocatively, she claims that such a choice of role model reveals that individuals in the autistic community have internalized some of the stereotypes used to define them. What is needed, according to her, is a more complicated picture of what it means to live with autism. Still, this chapter offers something that is largely missing from Imagining Autism as a whole: the possibility of resisting negative stereotypes of individuals on the spectrum.

In bringing such a diverse and eclectic group of characters together under the diagnostic label of "autism," Imagining Autism threatens to expand the scope of this condition to the point of incoherence. In Chapter 6, "The Autistic Label: Diagnosing (and Undiagnosing) the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," Loftis begins by diagnosing Lisbeth Salander as autistic, arguing that her "social struggles" and "intense interests" place her on the spectrum (132), and that her silence, or lack of reciprocity in dialogue, is "distinctively autistic" (133). Loftis then concludes that the climactic scene of the final novel erases this label, as she is declared "officially and legally neurotypical" (149). The implication, here, is that Lisbeth must be "undiagnosed" because audiences are not prepared to embrace an autistic or neurodiverse heroine. Yet, because, as Loftis admits, Lisbeth suggests "so many diagnoses […] that none of them ever become definitive," one cannot help but question the label itself (131). Indeed, the question becomes at what point characteristics like "social struggles" and "intense interests" can be understood as meeting the criteria for diagnosis, particularly within the realm of the literary. Loftis' numerous attempts at retrospective diagnosis can, at the same time, be read in a more positive light. In prompting such questions, Imagining Autism seems to propose that autism is not a thing with a specific nature and source but rather a nominal category comprising a "remarkably diverse group" of characters who "share many of the same basic traits (sensory sensitivities, social struggles, deep interests) and face many of the same problems (social rejection, familial violence, damaging label)" (152-153). In this way, Imagining Autism illuminates Stuart Murray's claim that retrospective diagnosis is "a fraught process that is all too open to the abuse of the lazy claim, but it can also be a radical critical intervention that is enlightening in extending the parameters of how we understand and read disability" (51). While this review has emphasized a number of perceived shortcomings, Loftis' Imagining Autism should be understood as an important and necessary early step in bringing the study of autism into the field of literary studies.

Notes
See also Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories (40-56).
Return to Text
Works Cited
Berger, James. The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Print. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814708460.001.0001
Bérubé, Michael. "Disability and Narrative." PMLA 120.2 (2005): 568-576. Web. 14 May 2013.
- - -. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Print.
McDonagh, Patrick. "Autism and Modernism: A Genealogical Exploration." Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2008. 99-116. Print.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print.
Murray, Stuart. Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Print.

Nonfiction on Human Anatomy, Autism, Inventions, and Ernst Haeckel | Xpress Reviews
BY LJ REVIEWS ON JANUARY 28, 2016
Week ending January 29, 2016
ON THE AUTISM SPECTRUM
Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. Indiana Univ. 2015. 208p. notes. ISBN 9780253018007. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780253018137. PSYCH
In this scholarly review of fictional works featuring characters who are autistic or whom the reader suspects may be somewhere on the autism spectrum, Loftis examines a wide range of topics, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD); cultural stereotypes; disability culture, especially ASD culture; and disability identity activism. Drawing from such works as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the author shows the cultural appeal of those who think differently and how they find their place in society. The influence of literature on the way people with ASD and other disabilities are viewed by others and whether this leads to how these individuals are regarded by society as a whole have not been critically studied. Loftis aims to foster an increased awareness of fictional characters with ASD and other neurological differences, which she hopes will in turn bring about a greater acceptance of those with ASD and knowledge within the field of disability studies.
Verdict In examining the concerns and misconceptions that drive depictions of people with ASD, Loftis sheds light on the representations that can lead to discrimination against those who have related conditions. Appropriate for larger libraries and university libraries with literature and disability studies departments.—Lisa Jordan, Johnson Cty. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Ben Fuqua, University of Georgia

References

Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Shakespeare's Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Sonya Freeman Loftis's Shakespeare's Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama tackles adaptation and appropriation with fresh vigor. Rather than negotiating ownership, Loftis interrogates a species of adaptation subsumed in intrinsic connection. In the book, she balances two theaters, exploring all of the various discourses in between. A reader might be surprised that a book with an early modern bent is laid out according to the development of modern drama and its great figures. Her chapters trace — in chronological order — the works of George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Heiner Müller. The book's trip from high modernism to postmodernism is, however, ultimately concerned by the constant and necessary intrusion of the great early modern stage figures into the careers of the more recent dramatists. By investigating the modern stage, Loftis explains how it is built by but also rebuilds its early modern precedents. Sometimes this discursive interdependence is born of protest, sometimes loving embrace, and often through experimentation resting in the knowledge that discursivity is always already a given.
In lieu of "adaptation," Loftis chooses the term "surrogacy," and it proves to be a nimble metaphor, though sometimes hard to define. Through surrogacy (or surrogation), Loftis concludes that in her book, adaptation has been allowed to appear "as grave robbery, skinning, cannibalism, haunting, and even disembodiment. It has worn the guise of epic theater and theater of the absurd, of modern comedy and postmodern pastiche. It has been represented by both acts of memory and acts of forgetting" (136). Poles are constantly being built in her discussion of surrogacy, and by oscillating between them we see the palimpsestic nature of drama across periodization. Methodologically, Loftis immediately shows the need to conflate corpse and corpus. Drawing on Derridean "hauntology," Loftis writes that "the theater is a particularly haunted cultural space, the drama an especially haunted art form" (xvii). We draw closer to surrogacy as we understand how the actions of so many past performers color the present performance or how the mass of play-texts, especially those most noted and notable, indelibly mark the playwright-at-work. Perhaps the most apt definition Loftis lends surrogacy also helps to map her project: citing Joseph Roach, Loftis calls surrogation a process by which "repetition is change," through which society, even in demanding evolution, always anchors itself in a past surrogate, demanding a Shakespeare to test how drama may then grow (2). Peeking back at the list, which unites cannibalism and acts of memory, a reader can expect a somewhat malleable surrogacy in Loftis's project, never exactly one thing but always the thing that allows early modernist work to seep into modernism, and for that matter, for modernists to look ahead as well as behind.
For example, personal displacement becomes Loftis's lens for discussing Shaw's surrogated relationship with Shakespeare. She combines the listing of Shaw's critical assaults on Shakespeare as well as readings of his plays to form a personal rivalry between the two men who lived centuries apart. For Shaw to exist in his own right, he seems to have believed he needed to supplant Shakespeare. Loftis's readings of Heartbreak House and Ceasar and Cleopatra fashion an embodied, rotting, father figure who must be cast aside. In Shakes versus Shav, Loftis concludes that Shaw cries out for the audience to understand that Shakespeare not only is but must be mortal. As his mortal body died, so must his legacy. Meditating on celebrity, influence, and creative innovation, Loftis ties Shakespeare to Shaw despite the latter's constant denunciations of the former, or rather, because of them. Shaw serves as a surrogate for Shakespeare, who must be dethroned if art is to evolve. Surrogacy becomes the difference between ignorance and cautioned influence in Shaw's case, when even the most acid critique pays service to what came before.
Shakespeare's Surrogates continues with these sorts of flourishes. It lingers on Brecht's obsession with deconstructing early modern works in literally visceral ways. As Brecht melts history away from Edward II, he focuses on literal instances of flaying. His Duchess of Malfi, originally hinging upon the "monuments" of the Duchess's seemingly dead family, is filled with the language of monuments, becoming a monument to monuments. Bodily violence makes violence to the literary corpus Brecht's strain of surrogation, even if in this case the corpus extends to Christopher Marlowe and John Webster (34). Less violently in O'Neill, Loftis reads Shakespeare as a surrogate father for the playwright, where memory of the father competes with performance of the same figure. Haunted by fathers, we enact their memories. Haunted by Shakespeare, we cannot help but retrace his steps. O'Neill's "rewriting of Shakespeare, while intended to mark his separation from his ghostly father, merely shows his indebtedness to him, as his use of Shakespearean quotations and motifs preserves the old text within his new text" (77). Conversely, Beckett and Stoppard happily engage with Shakespeare. Their conspicuous rewriting projects spell a new attempt to disrupt and surrogate Shakespeare's place in the canon as well as dramatic imagination. "Disrupt" is the key word in both cases. Attempts to forget Shakespeare in projects such as Beckett's Endgame or Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead only highlight the referent's absence. As Loftis writes of forgetting, it is "intricately entwined with the act of remembering" (93). Doing violence to Shakespeare's text, attempting to escape it, or simply forget it, these playwrights have merely continued to build on it or at least from it.
Loftis concludes with a chapter exploring Heiner Müller and extended implications for the concept of surrogation. Having already highlighted favorite early modern tropes such as flaying, dismembering, and general violence, Loftis's project provokes yet again by using Müller's flights of postmodern tinkering with Shakespeare in Hamletmachine to highlight the grizzly classics of cannibalism and crawling back into the mother's womb (115, 127). That being said, do not mistake provocation for flash. As with all of her readings in this book, Loftis treats Hamletmachine with much care. It is this chapter where the promise of the book takes on a new valence. Müller's experiments, like all that preceded his, end with an inability to escape a Shakespearean specter; Shakespeare is unavoidably superimposed onto the modern stage. Loftis writes that in rewriting the original Hamlet, Müller "preserves the Shakespearean past" as we have seen previously, but continues "and yet creates the dramatic future" (120). Projection of the past onto the present — or early modern onto the modern — makes way for the projection of the present onto the future — or modern on to postmodern. Surrogation is not limited to Shakespeare alone. As Shaw insists on becoming a surrogate for Shakespeare's creative place for the sake of progress, the progress of creativity demands that at some point someone must become a surrogate for Shaw; contextual substitution becomes key in Loftis's discussion of Müller, where Müller begs for the reorganization of Western tragedy (128). As always, attempts to supplant become acts of surrogation.
For Müller, like Shaw and the many others explored in this book, no amount of violence or meddling can erase Shakespearean primacy on the stage. Shakespeare's Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama not only looks to the past but also projects Shakespeare into the future, where influence can never be totally rewritten but remolded as long as some kernel of collective memory holds consistent. Do not confuse Loftis's work for theory alone, as the discussion of the modernist plays themselves warrant as much attention as those who will turn to Shakespeare's Surrogates for its contributions to adaptation studies. The book's blurring discourse is worthy of study for those interested in adaptation, diachronicity, the stability of the subject, the subjectivity of the corpus, enacted memory, or any other study focused on the permeability of literary and subjective barriers.

References

Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Shakespeare's Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.