Syntax, Lexis, and Textual Atypicality: A Neurodivergent Lens on Classical Authors – Gabriela Nidecka
May 20, 2026
Abstract
‘Neurodivergence’ is an overarching term defining an umbrella of conditions such ADHD, Autism and others – disorders, or rather differences, in communication styles, sensory processing and impairment with functioning. However, these conditions also possess strengths such as frequent monotropism found in autistic individuals, sensory acuity and an intense sense of principles, ethics and social justice, as well as an extreme awareness of detail. If we retrospectively diagnose authors with neurodivergent conditions we risk diminishing the author’s dimensions – including their biography, the content of their work, whether it is prose or verse and the messages they wished to convey through their written art. If we look at neurodivergence from an angle not of deficit, but difference applying such a lens on a textual and prosaic level can prove to be beneficial and ultimately, fruitful. My study will primarily derive its hypotheses from form – my reading is formalist and structuralist – my focal point is the stylistic, lexical and syntactic levels at which the author’s text operates, and subsequently how this style can reflect thinking which diverges from traditional prose styles. As scaffolding for my essay, I will examine the use of free indirect discourse in modernist writer’s works such as my findings in Virginia Woolf as well as radical poetics and subversive poetic styles in mystical poets such as William Blake and Emily Dickinson and how they emerge in direct opposition with the status quo of their contexts. I will analyse closely how at sentence level, syntax reflects atypical cognitive styles and succession of building sentences, how lexical choices modulate their understanding of the world, for example in abstract and concrete terms, and how their overall style mirrors or is suggestive of, a neurodivergent foundation when devising fiction – prose and verse.
Wiliam Blake’s Mystical Mode and Subversive Cosmology
For example, Wiliam Blake, the eccentric Romantic English dissenter poet who wrote at threshold of the 18th and 19th Centuries in London possessed an intense visionary imagination and his poetry is built around eidetic imagery. Blake’s work fundamentally rejects empiricism and the Enlightenment values of the era, focusing on the paramount importance of nature, natural impulse, and individual mysticism and what particurarly stand out in his corpus of hydridic work (engraved images synthesised with written poetry) is his non-linear pattern of thinking. His poetic style moved more associatively rather than logically or pragmatically – his hydridic style of artwork reflects this – the actual labour that went into his art reflect materially his philosophy and hint at an autistic tendency of a special interest. In Blake’s work, images recur in almost obsessive loops, his symbols mutate across texts and categories begin to collapse into each other – this can almost resemble autistic hyper-associative thinking and ADHD-style cognitive jumping. Blake also possessed an intense fixation on a self-conjured system of belief and philosophy – with figures such as Urizen (representing reason) and Los emerging – his lifelong immersion in narrow but intensely deep interests reflect a retrospective neurodivergent profile. Moreover, Balke consistently resisted the status quo in his critiques of industrialisation and child labour as well as Christian hypocrisy in poems such as ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ and ‘The Garden of Love’. His sensory was intuitive and sensory – this is reflected from a passage titled ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in which Blake aphoristically states: “To see the World in a Grain of Sand / and a heaven in a wildflower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour’ . His ecological sense of justice (a hallmark feature of an autistic profile) is reflected in the lines “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage’ – this quote reflects Blake’s view on the sanctity of animals and how our treatment of animals reflects our own ethical and moral methodologies. Blake also had a strong preference for internally coherent systems over established, external authority – this reflects his radical nature and thus his radical verse. Furthermore, his definitive outsider social position can be outlined through a biographical reading – Blake cannot be necessarily classified as a recluse, but he was isolated from the hegemonic norms of English society, and his mythology subverts completely from conventional religion and theology at the time. His literal conviction in his visions has been often dismissed or categorised as a mental illness, which in my opinion, is reductive. Blake, over time, constructed an entire cosmology across decades. To me, that level of sustained mythopoetic system/world-building resembles what psychologists now might call monotropic attention: a type of cognitive organising around intensely focused channels of interests. Blake privileges perception itself – the concept of divine imagination is sovereign to him. Most people, according to Blake are perceptually dampened and dulled – his explosive imagination diverged into multiple areas of interest whether that was social justice, religion or love for one’s neighbour. His rapid symbolic density of ideas devised over his lifetime reflects a neurodivergent paradigm of thought. Additionally, Blake’s writing is infused with formal experimentation such as his capitalisation of abstract nouns to reinforce their significance and his subversion of linear structure – in other words, Blake refuses dilution and filtration. For a critic “inhabits a radically different perceptual economy” . His subversive way of creation and devising verse can be reflected in maxims such as “Without Contraries, Is no Progression” (Blake loved to explore dialectical, e.g. the contrast between the innocence of an Edenic childhood and experience of a fallen adult world) and mystical statements such as “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man, as it is, infinite” . To summarise Balke’s central philosophy: repression for Blake translates into violence and corruption. One of his most obscure and enigmatic phrases from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ is the aphorism “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” – this anthropomorphising of abstract ideas reflect not only his environmental stance but also his celebration of the natural impulses including the sexual and primal- because to him, these were the purest and not repressed by establishments who were corrupted and aimed for economic gain e.g. the charity schools for poor children around Lambeth where Blake lived. Another example of his wisdom maxims is “A truth that is told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent” – this quote discusses the duplicity of truth and the hypocrisy of words and how language can be used to manipulate and shape society negatively and unfairly. Furthermore, encapsulating all of my arguments made, Blake famously stated “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s” – this radical opposition to authority reflects a neurodivergent confusion that emerges when trying to navigate a puzzling, hostile and unaccommodating world, but also the inability to read or analyse hierarchies or people’s assigned roles within society – creating an individual who deeply advocates for social equality and is ultimately a humanitarian and this objective is reflected in Blake’s verse. Furthermore, Blake’s syntax resists hierarchical ordering and for him, “meaning accumulates laterally:”. Blake utilises pattern recognition rather than formal deduction – he externalises an unfiltered associative cognition, which can resonate with neurodivergent audiences or readers within contemporary reception. Within Blake, text and image operate simultaneously rather than hierarchically – this mirrors his radical anti-establishment stance, and thus, reading Blake now becomes a type of multi modal processing. Balke’s work has significant features which stand out as potentially neurodivergent: his visual symbolism, typography (the spatial relation and bright, vibrant colours of his paintings as well as sharp contours), his mythic references and poetic rhythm all contribute to an atypical textual style. His symbolic genealogies reflect his persistent violation of the status quo. His texts are governed by associative lexis, sometimes even by dream or liminal logic, rejecting Enlightenment discursivity. Balke’s semantic oversaturation and recognisable intensity is psychologically intense and makes readers reflect on their fundamental values on life, existence, love and purpose.
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an Allegory of Executive Dysfunction
Franz Kafka, an Austrian writer of the early twentieth century, often examines the themes of social estrangement and pathological isolation and disillusionment form a hostile modern world. Especially in his famous novella The Metamorphosis, which follows a salesman named Gregor Samsa and his transformation into a large insect as he wakes up one morning. The novella discusses implicitly topics such as alienation and depression with the sue of the formal technique of anthropomorphising and allegory. Kafka’s prose can be identified as formally controlled but the outside world, for the author, is oftentimes unintelligible and this is reflected in his allegories of a confusing society and its systems, his lexis and his syntactic structures on a formal level. The world is inaccessible to Kafka’s characters, narrators and narratorial voices. Within the prose, consciousness cannot stop pathologically tracking and correcting itself. Kafka’s novella is permeated with failed communication, failed intimacy, failed authority, failed embodiment and failed social timing. For a critic, in Kafka, “shame becomes spatial entrapment”. A quote which reflects unease and alienation is from another novella, The Castle: ‘You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you are nothing’ , this reflects a pervasive sense of dislocation and unbelonging. In a letter, Kafka stated once “I am made of literature”- this hyperbolic sentence, which dissolves the boundary between self and object resembles a kind of autistic tendency to dissolution into the special interest, with no boundaries and no space for anything else. Furthermore, the intensity of his emotions and sensory scope is reflected in this quote from his letters to Milena (a lover): “You are the knife I turn inside myself” – the grotesque imagery mirrors the potency and severity of his emotional and romantic range. A quote which aligns with the reading of The Metamorphosis as an allegory for executive dysfunction is “What if he slept a little more and forgot all this nonsense” – this avoidance and delay of facing everyday existence mirrors the autistic experience of neurological burnout with the model or societal system which doesn’t accommodate an autistic individual, this could also read as a metaphor for a depressive state, the abstract noun ‘nonsense’ refers to the unintelligible, confusing structure of the outside world. Another quote which reflects a state of burnout overlapping with depression is from Kafka himself: “A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die” – this absurdism of everyday life and how suicidality reflects a new vigour for life is a controversial opinion, only states by a person who has contemplated such an act. In his letters to Felice, Kafka states “I have no literary interests, I consist of literature” – this absolutist view on identity inextricably linked with the interest he is most devoted to resembles an autistic hyper-intensity and focus for their chosen field or interest, in contemporary terms. However, on the other, hand it’s important not to reduce Kafka to his definition – his dedication dn devotion could have just been a natural impulse and not a retrospectively diagnosable feature of his personality. Another quote which reflects a neurodivergent affinity and sensitivity for sound and aural aspects of perception is this quote from The Metamorphosis: “Could he be an animal if music affected him so deeply?” Kafka here limits aesthetic sensitivity with fragile humanity constantly. The author once said that “writing is revealing oneself to excess” which mirrors the syntactic richness and resistance of closure that his sentences subsequently produce. Furthermore, he states “sleep does not help fi the soul is tired”, signalling at a deeper spiritual exhaustion one that exists on another dimension than simply tiredness – this resembles a kind of autistic non-functionality when in shutdown or burnout mode. It is useful to apply this lens of neurodivergent executive dysfunction onto Kafka’s novella because it produces a space in which neurodivergent readers can feel understand through the prose, and not necessarily when analysing whether the author would be retroactively diagnosed if they lived today. Furthermore, Kafka’s characters are primarily hyper-compliant – this dynamic almost resembles the neurodivergent concept of social masking. His protagonists constantly monitor themselves and correct themselves – for a critic “the syntax itself enacts cognitive self-surveillance”. The concept of executive dysfunction is mirrored by the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into a ‘gigantic insect’ because his mobility and physical liberty becomes restrained, reduced or even impossible. For example, he cannot get out of bed, open doors, speak intelligibly and navigate sensory spaces. This description mimics depression or burnout – the stagnation of it and social disablement. Kafka, according to a critic, was “unusually attentive to bureaucratic cognition” – his shifting criteria make his fiction uncanny, dreamlike and puzzling which in turn has captivated readers around the globe for decades.
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: The fluidity of prose
Virginia Woolf, the great modernist feminist writer could be identified as one of the most important and significant of the early twentieth century. Her prose tyle often mirrors the fluctuations of consciousness and she often utilises a non-linear sentence pattern and her sensory sensitivity is directly mirrored in her prose with intricate and extended description of the natural world and material objects, evoking an almost impressionistic form across her corpus of work (this includes her revolutionary essays such as ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Her syntax is often pre-positional, and she often uses syndetic listing when building her sentences (her style is anti-linear thought and utterance) e.g. she often employs associative parataxis within her prose. Furthermore, on a syntactic level, often there is minimal explicit subordination such as the use of “because”, “therefore”, “so” is rare. There is often also frequent shifts in subject matter mid-sentence or mid thought. This almost resembles non-hierarchical attention mapping. For example, there are clearly unstable subject boundaries in The Waves. In this novel, narration behaves like a shared cognitive field – identity is almost unequally distributed across fragments of speech- there is fluid self-other demarcation within her discourse. Woolf prefers sensorial nouns over interpretative verbs. Woolf uses what scholars call ‘phenomenological lexis’ – language that records perception and noticing before categorisation – her use of free indirect discourse aligns with my thesis stated in my ‘Abstract’ section of this essay. In The Waves, one of the speakers says “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me” . This idea of have multiple personalities depending on who is talking or who you are talking to, resembles the idea of autistic masking and camouflaging – the constant fluctuation of identity, only based on who is perceiving you. Another aspect of potential neuro-atypicality within Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel is this quote: “When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me, I am in darkness, I am nothing’. . This reliance on the “physicality” and materiality of words (but ultimately a substance that is transient, hence the metaphor of ‘smoke) to give meaning to experience as well as the black and white dichotomous thinking of ‘nothing’ strongly resembles a neurodivergent cognitive style. Furthermore, one of the speaker in The Waves states: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table”, and “let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself” – this declaration and desire for stasis can be frequently found in the autistic need for sameness and predictability but there is almost something beautiful about still life – something evoking painted art =- and Virginia associates this stillness with the fullness and authenticity of identity. Another quote which reflects this need for solidity and perceptual metaphor in which the abstract domain can be translated onto a more concrete domain is this one: “Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story…” . The collective pronoun of ‘us’ involves the reader closely with this activity of imagining a soldi life – this need for logical reasoning and events happen in succession can be frequently found within contemporary autistic or neurodivergent profiles. Ultimately, viewing Virginia Woolf’s use of parataxis, modernist fragmentation, unstable pronouns and recursive self-correction through a neurodivergent lens can be useful but ultimately, it is important to note that during her lifetime, autism wasn’t even recognised as a condition and thus treading with such reading reveals that it can only be ultimately hypothetical and extremely speculative.
Emily Dickinson: The Reclusive Queen of Broken Syntax and Dashes
A neurodivergent reading of Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary verse becomes persuasive not because of retrospective diagnosis alone, but because her poetry repeatedly formalises altered perception, sensory extremity, recursive thought and atypical lexis and syntactic formation. Her verse almost structurally reproduces a disrupted processing style and sensory acuity. She pervasively privileges abstract nouns, charged with metaphysical weight – such as capitalising (akin to Blake’s mystical way of capitalising abstract nouns) : “Light’, “Death”, ‘Difference’, ‘Zero’ and ‘Infinity’ – the capitalisation could also be classified as eccentric and unusual, but it places emphasis on her spiritual relationship with emotions, principles and abstractions. Her famous use of dashes interrupts grammatical continuity and creates pauses that feel cognitively charged rather than decorative. The often indicate delayed processing which often happens to a neurodivergent individual. Furthermore, biographically, Dickinson’s isolation and reclusiveness has often been romanticised, but from a neurodivergent perspective it can be read differently. Her withdrawal may not simply be an indicator of eccentricity or feminine fragility but rather an attempt to regulate overwhelming sensory and social environments. McNaughton’s point about Dickinson possessing “an intense awareness of the detail of any phenomenon in which she was vitally interested aligns strongly with what contemporary autism theorists describe as monotropic attention: sustained cognitive immersion in narrow but deeply elaborated perceptual or conceptual interest. Syntactically, Dickinson frequently omits connective tissue that conventional prose would require. Articles, explanatory clauses and transitions disappear- the result is elliptical compression: “A Quartz contentment, like a stone –“ . The noun phrase feels both precise and inaccessible – emotional states are translated into mineral imagery rather than psychological or mental exposition. Dickinson thus often records perception before social interpretation stabilises it. That is why the dashes matter so much – they are not random eccentric punctuation – they formally enact suspended cognition – moments where perception exceeds syntactic or sentence-level containment. The pause is most evident here : “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me – “.
Bibliography:
Franz Kafka. Letters to Milena. Edited by Willy Haas, translated by Tania and James Stern, Schocken Books, 1953. Originally published 1952.
Kafka, Franz. Letters to Felice. Edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth, Schocken Books, 1973. Originally published 1967.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. 1915.
Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Originally published 1926.
Virginia Woolf. The Waves. Hogarth Press, 1931.
William Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. 1794.
Blake, William. Auguries of Innocence. Written c.1803, first published 1863.
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