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The Cambridge Quarterly 2004 33(2):155-172; doi:10.1093/camqtly/33.2.155
© 2004 by Cambridge Quarterly
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‘These irritant bodies’: Blinding and Blindness in Dystopia

Werner von Koppenfels

University of Munich

The narratives of blinding and blindness by Cyrano de Bergerac, Swift, Wells, Wyndham and Saramago discussed in this essay confront rational vision, threatened by extinction in dystopia, with a collective state of blindness. From H. G. Wells's ‘Country of the Blind’ onward, modern dystopias have tended to use the concept of epidemic blindness as an apocalyptic scenario to state the ‘eclipse of enlightenment’. Despite their obvious differences in plot, style and period, all these texts by way of historical filiation – prove to be variants of the same multiform genre, Menippean Satire.


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