Kate E. Tunstall

Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (eBook, PDF)

With a new translation of Diderot's 'Letter on the Blind' and La Mothe Le Vayer's 'Of a Man Born Blind'

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind. Diderot was the editor of the Encyclopédie, that Trojan horse of Enlightenment ideas, as well as a novelist, playwright, art critic and philosopher. His Letter on the Blind of 1749 is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature because it contradicts a central assumption of Western literature and philosophy, and of the Enlightenment in particular, namely that moral and philosophical insight is dependent on seeing. Kate Tunstall's essay guides the reader through the Letter, its anecdotes, ideas and its conversational mode of presenting them, and it situates the Letter in relation both to the Encyclopedie and to a rich tradition of writing about and, most importantly, talking and listening to the blind.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. August 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781441175434
• Artikelnr.: 48422440

Autorenporträt

Kate E. Tunstall is University Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College. She is Programme Director of Oxford's Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, a Director of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and she co-authored and co-presented (with Caroline Warman) a series of BBC radio programmes on Diderot.

KATE E. TUNSTALL is Associate Professor of French in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. Her research interests are mostly in eighteenth-century and Enlightenment writing, from philosophy to aesthetics. She is author of Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (Bloomsbury, 2011), editor of Self-Evident Truths?: Human Rights and the Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2012), and co-editor of Diderot and Rousseau: networks of Enlightenment (SVEC, 2011), Pre-Histories and Afterlives: Studies in Critical Method (Legenda, 2008), Displacement, Asylum, Migration (OUP, 2006).