ABSTRACT

Blind Narrations and Artistic Subjectivities: Corporeal Refractions makes an important contribution to the field of blindness studies by highlighting the centrality of blindness in literary compositions. It presents a critical interpretation of selected prose writings by three blind authors: Argentine poet, short story writer, and essayist Jorge Luis Borges; Australian religious educator and diarist John M. Hull; and the American memoirist and poet Stephen Kuusisto.

The volume discusses themes like

  • theorising the corporeality of writing
  • aesthetic turn to the experience of blindness
  • altered sensation and self-understanding
  • lived experience of growing blind
  • self-knowledge through interaction with the world
  • artistic subjectivity, narrative choices, and the ‘implied’ author

This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of blindness studies, disability studies, arts and aesthetics, literature, cultural studies, and philosophy.

chapter 1|24 pages

Introduction

Theorising the Corporeality of Writing

chapter 2|35 pages

Blindness in Borges's Fictions

chapter 4|34 pages

The Everyday Experience of Growing Blind

Narrative Subjectivity in Hull

chapter 6|19 pages

The Poetical Subjectivity of Kuusisto

chapter 8|10 pages

Artistic Subjectivity, Narrative Choices, and the Author

Their Relation as a Function of Bodily Being

chapter |3 pages

Afterword