Bolt, David (2024) Blindness and Literature: Critical Engagements with the Representational Binaries of Western Modernity. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press.
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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.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Blind characters, social attitudes, ocularcentrism, metanarrative of blindness, literary disability studies, literary blindness studies, Jessica Langworthy, Jacob Twersky, Deborah Kent, Georgina Kleege. |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | David Bolt |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Oct 2024 09:51 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Nov 2024 11:43 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4381 |
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