Kleege, Georgina 1956-

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Kleege, Georgina 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born 1956.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of California—Berkeley, 322 Wheeler Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1030. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Has taught creative writing and literature at Ohio State University and the University of Oklahoma; University of California at Berkeley, currently English faculty member.

WRITINGS:

Home for the Summer (novel), Post-Apollo Press (Sausalito, CA), 1989.

Sight Unseen (nonfiction), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (nonfiction), Gallaudet University Press (Washington, DC), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Raritan, Ragged Edge, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Journal of Visual Culture, and Social Research.

SIDELIGHTS:

Georgina Kleege has less than ten percent of her vision remaining because of the macular degeneration that has deteriorated her eyes since childhood. In her book Sight Unseen, she attempts to describe what being nearly blind has been like for her, while also trying to overcome people's misconceptions about what it means to be blind. Although the work is not a memoir, Kleege talks about many experiences from her personal life. She relates how her parents, both artists, were disappointed with their daughter's diagnosis; how she managed to cleverly hide her growing blindness from others at school by memorizing texts and playing off other people's reactions to what they saw; and how she only recently learned to read Braille because her doctor had told her she saw too well to study it. Kleege also spends considerable time discussing how books and movies portray the blind incorrectly or even in a demeaning manner.

"This isn't the usual trite drivel about blind people's gift for seeing things figuratively and morally that sighted people can't," related Catherine Kudlick in an assessment of Sight Unseen for the National Federation of the Blind Web site. "Instead it's a celebration of all the physical and emotional details—the simple things that bring frustration, dignity, fear, pride, or even the slightly curled lip of amusement to those who think about the world around them. Kleege's gift sparkles on every page, particularly in her deft use of routine images to draw the bridge between her and her reader." "Although sometimes didactic, Kleege gives readers an enlightening look at life with marginal eyesight," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. F. Gonzalez-Crussi reported in Commonweal that Sight Unseen is "a book that goes a long way toward promoting a balanced attitude that seeks to understand the implications, and therefore mitigate the pangs, of this affliction." The reviewer concluded that "in the finest tradition of nonfiction writing, [this book] delights and instructs at the same time."

Kleege is also the author of Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. While admiring the famous subject of this book, Kleege also criticizes those who hold Keller up as a model whom all other blind people should emulate. The author considers this unrealistic, and she analyzes both her own and other people's fascination with Keller. Margaret Heilbrun, writing for the Library Journal, called Blind Rage "utterly absorbing, both in its graceful renditions of particular days in Keller's life and in the author's self-analysis along the way."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Kleege, Georgina, Sight Unseen, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 1999, William Beatty, review of Sight Unseen, p. 1013.

British Medical Journal, January 1, 2000, Alistair Fielder, review of Sight Unseen, p. 66.

Commonweal, August 13, 1999, "A Clearer Vision," p. 26.

Library Journal, February 15, 1999, Carol Ann McAllister, review of Sight Unseen, p. 162; September 1, 2006, Margaret Heilbrun, review of Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, p. 156.

NWSA Journal, fall, 2002, "Invisible Disability: Georgina Kleege's ‘Sight Unseen.’"

Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1999, review of Sight Unseen, p. 70.

Reference & Research Book News, February 1, 2007, review of Blind Rage.

UNESCO Courier, July 1, 2001, "Beauty and the Blind," p. 47.