Tuesday 24 November 2015

Victorian Blindness at the National Archive

On Thursday 3rd December, 2015, Dr Heather Tilley is giving a public lecture on 'Victorian Blindness: A History of Advocacy':

Blindness in the Victorian era was an issue of popular - and often fraught – debate. Using the history of finger reading, this talk will trace how blind and visually-impaired people became increasingly vocal in seeking control and ownership over social and political issues that directly affected them, introducing some of the era's most prominent and influential blind campaigners.
More details here

Monday 9 November 2015

Jacques Lusseyran and Jérôme Garcin

One of the highlights of the Blind Creations conference was Zina Weygand's keynote speech about the blind French resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran. (The recording of Weygand's talk is available on this page in French; the English translation is here). Now another of the conference's invited speakers, French novelist Romain Villet (who took part in the Creative Writers' Round Table, available here), has written a response to Jérôme Garcin's recent fictionalised biography of Lusseyran, Le Voyant. In his article (available in French here), Villet argues that even though Garcin's book offers a thoughtful discussion of Lusseyran's blindness, most readers of both Garcin and Lusseyran, fail to critically interrogate the often stereotypical, often flawed representations of blindness with which they are presented.