[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Aesthetics of Blindness thesis

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Sending the abstract of a Doctorate thesis entitled Towards an 
Aesthetics of Blindness:An Interdisciplinary Response to Synge, Yeats 
and Friel completed at the English Department at Trinity College, Dublin 
by David Feeney. Sounds very interesting. For more information contact 
David Feeney Phd at lime119 at hotmail.com
Thanks to Prof. Kennedy for passing the news of this doctorate along.
Best,
Lisa


Abstract

This project is an interdisciplinary investigation of the ways in
which the beauty which the sighted experience in primarily visual
terms registers itself on the awareness of the blind. I present
portrayals of the experience of blindness by three sighted
playwrights as a medium through which to place recent shifts in
aesthetic theory and various discourses on the experience of
marginality into meaningful relation to one another.

In the first chapter I demarcate the conceptual boundaries within
which the investigation is conducted. I present an account of the
different levels at which theorists and artists are endeavoring to
undo the traditional hegemony of vision and isolate instances of
ocularcentric conceptions of beauty for further investigation. I
trace a connection between a postmodern weariness of the traditional
spectatorial approach to beauty and a recent literary tendency
towards a brightening of what Georgina Kleege terms the “Oedipal
gloom.” I explain the reasoning behind the restriction of the
enquiry to non-metaphorical conceptions of blindness and my
deliberate avoidance of ocular rhetoric which is laden with
metaphorical connotation.

Chapters Two to Four represent the literary section of the thesis.
They consider in turn Synge’s _The Well of the Saints_, Yeats’s _On
Baile’s Strand_ and Friel’s _Molly Sweeney_. I place the portrayed
aesthetic experiences in the context of conventional accounts of
certain aspects of the ‘universal’ aesthetic experience and consider
the extent to which Synge’s musicianship and general sensitivity as
a listener, Yeats’s immersion in the visual arts and captivation by
visual beauty in general, and Friel’s fascination with the limits of
language, can be said to inform their respective renderings of a
non-visual aesthetic.

Chapter Five serves as a connective between the theoretical and
literary sections of the thesis and the sampling of relevant
extracts from the autobiographies of the blind which follows in
Chapter Six. The fifth chapter examines some aspects of the
psychology of perception which help to generate an understanding of
the way the theory, the imaginative portrayals and the lived
experience interface with one another. The final chapter is
dedicated almost exclusively to the testimony of the blind. I
contrast the type of order which tends to be a feature of their
everyday existence with the order which is commonly hailed as a
primary component of the aesthetic experience. I then detail the
type of dramatic restructuring which the onset of adventitious
blindness generally prompts and explain its role in the development
of an appreciation of non-visual sites of beauty. I contrast the
impediment that residual visual memory comes to assume within the
aesthetic experience of the blind with the perspective brought to
their task by the sighted dramatists who undertake a portrayal of
the condition.

What surfaces at the end of the investigation into the translations
between theoretical, imaginative, and lived accounts of blindness,
is a description of the tendency among the sighted to aestheticize
blindness on visual terms, and a review of the rewards awaiting the
sighted artist who manages to resist that particular temptation.