Georgina kleege wikipedia death

The following article originally appeared on the web site of the College of Letters and Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley. It describes the highly successful professional career of Dr. Kleege, who has had as the focus of her professional research, the portrayal of blindness in literature. In one of her courses in the English department, lecturer Georgina Kleege places a question before her students: Do autobiographies written by people with disabilities demystify disability and offer a valuable view into lives at the margins of culture, or are these memoirs merely another form of freak-show, helping to reinforce the notion that disability is a tragedy to be heroically overcome?

Many accounts of the lives of disabled people are both candid and revealing, while retaining a success-against-the-odds ring about them. Consider Dr. Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. These works seemed to fall into two categories. But in the end Kleege has not only written about her blindness, she has challenged the existing stereotypes by analyzing and dissecting them.

Georgina Kleege (born ) is an American writer and a professor of English at University of California, Berkeley.

Ultimately she provides more than insights into blind life: she provides a framework that helps readers humanize disability. Following Sight Unseen , Kleege wrote Blind Rage: An Open Letter to Helen Keller , a work of creative nonfiction that engages the ghost of Keller in a fictional conversation about the nature of blindness and coping with disability.

Kleege, who was pronounced legally blind at the age of 11, has taught writing and literature at University of Oklahoma and Ohio State University. She teaches literature and creative writing in the English department and in the disability studies minor program. Though Helen Keller was writing nearly a century ago, Kleege says, her life experiences raise profoundly relevant issues for disabled people today.

As a young girl Keller was accused of plagiarism in connection with a short piece of fiction she wrote in school. Does a deaf and blind child have imagination?