Date of Award
2008
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Department
English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing
Keywords
Education, Social sciences, Language, literature and linguistics, Grimm, Jacob, Grimm, Wilhelm
Supervisor
Dr. Nicole Markotić
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
"A Narrative Blind Eye: Visual Disability Representation within the Brothers Grimm Folk Tales" explores the disability representations within Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's nineteenth-century Children's and Household Tales. The Grimm tales contain numerous characters (dwarfs, giants, one-eyed daughters, etc.). Often the disabled Grimm characters are villains or disabled on account of the tale's villain, connecting blindness metaphorically to evil or punishment. The Grimms feature disability as a narrative device, suggesting that disability embodies deviance and/or non-ideal Otherness. Specifically turning to, and building upon, the arguments within Narrative Prosthesis by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Enforcing Normalcy by Lennard J. Davis, Roland Barthes's structural and semiological analysis of narratives and Jack Zipes' scholarship of the Grimm tales, I examine how disability operates within literature at a metaphorical level. My thesis advocates the literary dissection and understanding of narrative structuralism and devices within folk tales in order to challenge existing visual disability ideologies.
Recommended Citation
Laxdal, Leah, "A narrative blind eye: Visual disability representation within the Brothers Grimm folk tales" (2008). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 7999.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/7999