Lessons from a Purblind World

Abstract

This paper was an experiment presented on the “Organizing Care” panel of the 2014 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. It deals with a variety of kinds of blindness, not least those of the literary critic. It reflects upon an overlooked episode in the annals of British medical history, illustrating substantive changes in the understanding of eye disease and eye care, as well as the discrepancy in visual health between rural areas and the metropolis. Additionally, the episode raises important questions about seeing and its relationship to reading – or what we care to read. The partial or “pur”-blindness of readers haunts literary criticism. In advocating “surface reading,” for instance, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus suggest “that what lies in plain sight has been overlooked or cannot easily be seen” by scholars of literature. The oral presentation of this paper shifted the terms from visual to aural: sections of the audience heard distinctly different papers and understood questions and answers according to disparate sets of concerns. They did not see (or hear) the parenthetical references or footnotes of the printed paper: this experiment would work best if the reader also could ignore these additions.