Blind Narrations and Artistic Subjectivities

Aravinda Bhat is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India. He holds a PhD in English Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. He teaches European literatures in translation, the intellectual history of Europe, research practices, critical thinking, creative writing, and German. His research interests include literature by blind and visually impaired authors, Disability Studies, philosophy, and the novel. Through his work, he indulges his love of books.

Acknowledgements ix

Foreword xii

1 Introduction: Theorising the Corporeality of Writing 1

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Narrative Choices, Bodily Condition, and Artistic

Subjectivity 2

1.3 Contribution to Scholarly Conversation 5

1.4 Theoretical Approaches and Concepts 9

1.5 The Research Claim and Chapter Summaries 21

2 Blindness in Borges’s Fictions 25

2.1 The Metaphorical Articulation of Blindness 28

2.2 The Dialectic of the Ideal and the Experiential 34

2.3 The Aesthetic Turn to the Experience of Blindness 47

3 Altered Sensation and Self-understanding in

Borges’s Fictions 60

3.1 Durée and Intuition 62

3.2 Disabled Characters and Variations in Subjective

Time 63

3.3 Memory, Cyclical Time, and Creativity 73

4 The Everyday Experience of Growing Blind:

Narrative Subjectivity in Hull 80

4.1 The Narrative Form of the Diaries 81

4.2 Life and (Diary) Text 86

4.3 Dreaming and Waking Life 88

4.4 The Self-Constitutive Power of Archetypes 108

viii Contents

5 Self-Knowledge through Interaction with the World 114

5.1 Knowing the Body, Knowing the Self 119

5.2 Social Interaction and Self-Knowledge 129

6 The Poetical Subjectivity of Kuusisto 134

6.1 Being Bound with the Minute Threads of

Normalcy 135

6.2 Boyhood and Adolescence 137

6.3 Struggles with Normativity: The Adult Years 149

7 The Narrative Dialectic of Silences and Articulations

in the Memoirs of Kuusisto 153

7.1 Questions and Answers Regarding Blindness 153

7.2 The Aesthetic of Listening 154

7.3 The Narrative Dialectic in Kuusisto’s Memoirs 161

8 Artistic Subjectivity, Narrative Choices, and the Author:

Their Relation as a Function of Bodily Being 171

8.1 Subjectivity through the Alter Ego, Voice, and

Perspective in Borges 173

8.2 Reflecting on Experience: Narrative Form in Diary and

Memoir 178

Afterword 181

Works Cited 184

Index