Sympathetic Imagination and the Concept of Face: Narratives of Blindness in the Long Nineteenth-Century.
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2018-08
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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This dissertation explores how sympathy conditions blind narratives, and also how Otherness is constituted within them. Arranged in three sections, “Recognizing Blindness,” “Representing Blindness,” and “Retelling Blindness,” I examine the nineteenth-century uses of “sympathy” in the literary representation of blindness. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’ (1906-1995) concept of “face,” I read each narrative as an example of how historically and generically people’s sympathy towards Others has been presented, transmitted, and re-presented. What I call the “sympathetic imagination” represents the point of contact between the understanding of disabilities in the nineteenth century and its relation to Levinas’ ethical encounter with alterity, as I argue that each narrative uses “face” as a trope to represent the extended sympathies and enduring dilemmas provoked by encounters with blindness.
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