Toward An Aesthetics Of Blindness

Blindness has always fascinated those who can see. Although modern imaginative portrayals of the sightless experience are increasingly positive, the affirmative elements of these renderings are inevitably tempered and problematized by the visual predilections of the artists undertaking them. This book explores a variety of the (dis)continuities between depictions of the sightless experience of beauty by sighted artists and the lived aesthetic experiences of blind people. It does so by pressing a radical interdisciplinary reinterpretation of celebrated dramatic portrayals of blindness into service as a tool with which to probe the boundaries of the capacities of the sighted imagination while exploring the sensory detriment of our visually fixated notions of beauty. Works by J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, and Brian Friel are explored as a means of crafting a workable and innovative medium of theoretical and experiential exchange between the disciplines of literature, aesthetics, and disability studies. In addition to appraising previously unexamined aspects of the work of three of Ireland's most celebrated modern dramatists, this book considers the consequences for blind people of the exclusionary and prohibitive elements of traditional aesthetic theory and art education. The insights yielded will be of value to those with an interest in modern literature, differential aesthetics, visual culture, perception, and the experience of blindness.

More Than Meets the Eye' seeks to dismantle traditional understandings of blindness through scrutiny of philosophical speculation, scientific case studies, literary depictions, and museum access programs for the blind. It introduces blind and visually impaired artists whose work has shattered stereotypes and opened up new aesthetic possibilities for everyone.

"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 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 theorizing 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"--

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change. This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts. This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

This is the first book to study adult and child art students actually participating in courses designed with their needs in mind in universities and schools for the blind. In doing so, it uniquely delves into the topic of the culture of education and society and its affects on an understanding of blindness and the visual arts. Furthermore, through an analysis of individual and group behaviour, the book also introduces a new cultural model for studying blindness and disability, investigates the social influences on the nature of blindness and the treatment of people who are blind, and examines the influences that have affected the self belief of blind students and the way they create art. There are a number of books on the education of people who are blind or deaf. However, these are largely descriptive or based on experimental rather than observational or social research. Furthermore, books that have analysed blindness and the arts only analyse tactile perception in the education of students who are blind, not social and cultural factors. In addition, although there have been many books and articles analysing research on the perception of aesthetics and blindness, there are only two, one first published in the 1950s and now long out of print (Lowenfeld V & Brittain WL, 1987), and the other published in 2003 (Axel E & Levent N Eds., 2003) that consider the practice of this subject in depth. In particular, there have been no books solely addressing the culture of arts education by non-visual means. This book represents a unique study of the theory of blindness and the arts. In its first section it analyses traditional models of blindness and disability, finding that the history of disability is more a reflection of changes in society towards its scientific study and classification. This book then presents a unique social psychological study of arts students, both children and adults, in situ, their understanding and practice of the arts, particularly the visual arts, and their reaction to the attitudes of their teachers, past and present. In researching the material for the book, the book's author has collaborated with internationally renown charities in the area of blindness, galleries, exhibitions and art, such as Art Education for the Blind, New York and BlindArt, London, leading to interest from museum and gallery professionals in his work. University courses and practising teachers can also benefit from this book. In particular, there are few resources which directly relate to studies of teaching practise in undergraduate and postgraduate courses specialising in the education of students with physical disabilities, or students studying for undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees in subjects such as Disability Studies, Sociology, Social and Applied Psychology, and Fine Art and Design.

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.

The third edition of the acclaimed Routledge Companion to Aesthetics contains over sixty chapters written by leading international scholars covering all aspects of aesthetics. This companion opens with an historical overview of aesthetics including entries on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Goodman, and Wollheim. The second part covers the central concepts and theories of aesthetics, including the definitions of art, taste, the value of art, beauty, imagination, fiction, narrative, metaphor and pictorial representation. Part three is devoted to issues and challenges in aesthetics, including art and ethics, art and religion, creativity, environmental aesthetics and feminist aesthetics. The final part addresses the individual arts, including music, photography, film, videogames, literature, theater, dance, architecture and design. With ten new entries, and revisions and updated suggestions for further reading throughout, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is essential for anyone interested in aesthetics, art, literature, and visual studies.