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date: 12 February 2025

Blindness and Literature: Critical Engagements with the Representational Binaries of Western Modernitylocked

Blindness and Literature: Critical Engagements with the Representational Binaries of Western Modernitylocked

  • David BoltDavid BoltLiverpool Hope University

Summary

Literary blindness refers to the renderings of blind people in literature or the sustained critical engagement with which is sometimes termed literary blindness studies. Literary blindness studies is a formally emerging field in which a particular focus falls on the binaries of literary blindness. These binaries date back to antiquity but proliferated in Western modernity. Blind characters were usually drawn in extremes, negative and positive, which in modernism came to build and bolster the sociocultural metanarrative of blindness by which ocularnormativism and the supremacy of sight were implied if not stated. Academic interest in these representations ranged from early-20th-century work in the social sciences to late-20th-century cultural disability studies and 21st-century literary disability studies. The prototypical and foundational studies involved identifying recurrent literary motifs and evidence of pejorative or laudatory characterization, which often revealed remarkably lengthy lineage and resonance with social attitudes to blind people. These readings paved the way for more nuanced literary theory and criticism that explored nonnormative means of perception with a growing appreciation of experiential knowledge. This being so, the authors of both literary blindness and literary blindness studies have become recognized for their positionality: whether or not the creators and critics are themselves blind has become factored into the related discourse. Literary blindness studies, then, has emerged as an interdisciplinary field, explicitly informed by literary studies but implicitly underpinned by the epistemology and values of disability studies; it provides a space in which literary blindness can be explored with heightened awareness of the sociocultural implications for blind people.

Subjects

  • British and Irish Literatures
  • 19th Century (1800-1900)
  • 20th and 21st Century (1900-present)

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