Memoir and meditation on blindness.

Blind Narrations and Artistic Subjectivities: Corporeal Refractions makes an important contribution to the field of blindness studies by highlighting the centrality of blindness in literary compositions. It presents a critical interpretation of selected prose writings by three blind authors: Argentine poet, short story writer, and essayist Jorge Luis Borges; Australian religious educator and diarist John M. Hull; and the American memoirist and poet Stephen Kuusisto. The volume discusses themes like theorising the corporeality of writing aesthetic turn to the experience of blindness altered sensation and self-understanding lived experience of growing blind self-knowledge through interaction with the world artistic subjectivity, narrative choices, and the ‘implied’ author This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of blindness studies, disability studies, arts and aesthetics, literature, cultural studies, and philosophy.

This book explores how phenomenological ideas about embodiment, perception, and lived experience are discussed within disability studies, critical race theory, and queer studies. Building on these disciplines, it offers readings of memoirs and novels that address the consequences of stigmatization and the bodily dimensions of social differences. The texts include Robert F. Murphy’s The Body Silent, Simi Linton’s My Body Politic, Rod Michalko’s The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, three memoirs by Stephen Kuusisto, Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book, as well as two novels, Matthew Griffin’s Hide and Armistead Maupin’s Maybe the Moon. All of the texts discussed in this book negotiate the significance of bodily and perceptual habits, the influence of language and culture on embodiment, the importance of relationality and community, the severe effects of misrecognition, and the possibilities of emancipation and social recognition. Hence, they are read as pioneering contributions to the emerging field of critical phenomenology.

A music sheet cuts in half a city, coloring the space in bloody red. A grotesque Dragon finds his opponents by licking the walls of the castles where they might hide, searching for their souls. A lonely lady searches for someone, while she holds a moon, keeping it from falling on the planet. Many secrets await on the mysterious planet Plaoenr. In this book, artwork and text coexist to disclose planet Plaoenr secrets. The various pieces of information need to be analyzed and interpreted, and the truth can be reached by piecing things together.

Originally published as: Illness and the limits of expression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2007.

The Lal Kitab, a rare book in urdu, was popular in north-west India, Pakistan, Iran and many other countries. This English version has added new dimensions to make it more lucid and easier to understand.

Literature and Disability introduces readers to the field of disability studies and the ways in which a focus on issues of impairment and the representation of disability can provide new approaches to reading and writing about literary texts. Disability plays a central role in much of the most celebrated literature, yet it is only in recent years that literary criticism has begun to consider the aesthetic, ethical and literary challenges that this poses. The author explores: key debates and issues in disability studies today different forms of impairment, with the aim of showing the diversity and ambiguity of the term "disability" the intersection between literary critical approaches to disability and feminist, post-colonial, and autobiographical writing genre and representations of disability in relation to literary forms including novels, short stories, poems, plays and life writing This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of literary critical approaches to disability representation.

Who is not in distress in the present era' Some are anguished mentally some physically some by children some by spouse. There is no harmony in the family as before. Everybody wants to cook one's meal separately. The tradition of the joint family has already been shattered. One who is in trouble primarily wants freedom from it be it only a minor wound. His first priority remains to get relief from the pain whatsoever it may cost. The author of Lal Kitab had understood this principle much earlier and created trials or remedies imbibing good conduct righteousness and fundamental code of social and universal conduct along with the interweave of astrology so that the person might secure relief from the pain as well as remain connected with the societal customs. Most of the people in India are very well acquainted with the name of 'Lal Kitab' Originally this book was written by Shri. Girdhari Lal Sharma in Urdu language. Subsequently it was translated into Hindi language. Some adulteration is quite natural in the translated version of the original text. Primarily our rishi-maharshis godmen astrologers fortune-tellers like Narad Parashar Kalidas Varahmihir Jaimini Bhrigu etc. and the contemporary saints had prescribed yajna hawan worship chanting God's name rituals and donations to mitigate the bad effect of planets. Later on acknowledging the paucity of money and time Shri Girdhari Lal Sharma the author of the original Lal Kitab proposed remedies that were simple and required least expense of money. These easy remedies became very popular in India. Keeping in mind a code of conduct dharma practical aspects good conduct and the basic principles of life and the need for proper discipline in society the author had suggested the remedies which were accepted by the common men by heart. For example respect of elders service to parents offering grass to cow offering bread to dog feeding monkeys with gram and jaggery etc. are such remedies that can easily be done by everybody. The principality of twelve signs and nine planets of Indian astrology has also been accepted by Lal Kitab. The mere difference is that whereas in the prevalent astrology the ascendant is determined by the time of birth Lal Kitab always keeps it between Aries and Pisces.

The Problems of Viewing Performance challenges long-held assumptions by considering the ways in which knowledge is received by more than a single audience member, and breaks new ground by, counterintuitively, claiming that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Given that viewers come to each performance with differing amounts and types of knowledge, they each make different assumptions as to how the performance will unfold. Often modified by other viewers and often after the performance event, knowledge of performance is made more accurate by superimposing the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers. These differences in the viewing experience make knowledge surrounding a performance intersubjective. Ultimately, this book explains the how and the why audience members have different viewing experiences. The Problems of Viewing Performance is important reading for theatre and performance students, scholars and practitioners, as it unpacks the dynamics of spectatorship and explores how audiences work.