Intimacy and the Aesthetic of “Litter” Writing:

Epistolary Renarrativisation in Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

Authors

  • Krishna Kumar S

Keywords:

Keller, Kleege, letters, blindness, intimacy, re-narrativisation

Abstract

First-person genres of life writing such as autobiography and diary at the point of their completion evoke anxiety about the ‘death of the author.’ The letter does not do so: it forms part of a correspondence and facilitates continued writing. Its relational nature indicates that the epistolary closure might nevertheless spell authorial death upon readerly non-response. This paper inquires into the problem of non-response as confronted by the subject who addresses her letters to a dead person with reference to Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006). The readerly silence in a fictional correspondence thwarts the subject’s desire for interpersonal intimacy. In Blind Rage, however, the very act of writing the letter rather than its intersubjective reciprocation becomes a way of forging intimacy with one’s dead addressee; the fulfilment of intimacy in fictional letter writing is processual and not closural.

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Author Biography

Krishna Kumar S

Krishna Kumar S is a doctoral student in the Department of English Literature at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. His PhD work explores how blind writers from the early modern period have employed the letter as an effective form of disability life writing to develop a personal narrative of blindness. His research interest includes disability life narrative, ecopoetics, and modern and postmodern poetry.

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Published

2021-11-12

How to Cite

Kumar S, K. (2021). Intimacy and the Aesthetic of “Litter” Writing: : Epistolary Renarrativisation in Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 6(2), 50–61. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/131