| Abstrakt: |
Abstract:In "The Country of the Blind" (1904) H. G. Wells imagines a community of congenitally blind citizens who have fashioned an accessible built environment in which they thrive. As he revises that story thirty-five years later, he imagines that community obliterated due to its members' folly. In Wells's story, the blind have become the "normals," possessing the cultural capital to designate the sighted protagonist a lunatic who could be "cured" through surgical blinding. In 1904 that fantasy was tolerable, but in 1939 it appeared to parallel events in Nazi Germany, where, Wells suggests, the "deranged" and "defective" rule. |
