Personal and cultural histories of blindness
Reading American Notes is how Helen Keller’s mother learned that her deafblind child could be educated. In that travel narrative, Charles Dickens wrote about his meeting with Laura Bridgman (the first deafblind person to be ...
The empirical impulse as philosophized and practiced by Galileo, Bacon, and Hooke (Chapter 5), and as poeticized by Milton (Chapter 6), came into fruition by the end of the seventeenth century culminating, perhaps, in the ...
John Milton is in some ways the heart of There Plant Eyes. After all, the title comes from a passage in his 1667 Paradise Lost–read the short passage from the famous invocation to the Muse ...
Chapter 5, “Telescopes, Microscopes, Spectacles, and Speculations,” brings There Plant Eyes into the world of Early Modern science. Galileo, Bacon, Hooke, and Descartes are just some of the authors we meet in this chapter that ...
Continuing our consideration of blindness as punishment and moral corrective discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, “Out, Vile Jelly!” is a deep dive into one iconic example of blinding, namely the violent plucking of the ...
In Chapter 3, Godin explores the Greek-inflected Christian origins of the saintly blind and blindness as corrective tropes that expand and subtly change ideas of compensation and punishment as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. ...
Tiresias the blind prophet who makes an appearance on the stage and page of so many Greek tragedies and epics (for example, Oedipus, Antigone, The Odyssey) is perhaps the oldest and most famous of the ...
In the first chapter of There Plant Eyes, we travel back to the formative years of blindness in the Western cultural imagination: namely, the text of The Odyssey (traditionally ascribed to Homer), where so many ...
In Book VII of The Odyssey we meet Demodocus, the blind bard who is in large part responsible for our association of Homer with blindness. The below text comes from Alexander Pope’s 1726 translation of ...
The introduction to There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness presents Godin’s earliest moments with vision loss when she was ten and visited so many baffled eye doctors. But the autobiographical quickly ...
