Abstract of Project Funded for FY 2000
| Crossing the Divide: Helen Keller and Yvonne Pitrois Dialogue about Diversity
Rachel Hartig, Foreign Languages and Literatures How does the person with a difference most effectively cross the cultural divide and explain himself/herself to mainstream society? This is the question raised by Helen Keller (1880-1968) the renowned deaf-blind American writer and scholar and her French counterpart, the biographer Yvonne Pitrois (1880-1937) in a letter that we discovered at the library of the American Foundation for the Blind. Keller's letter to Pitrois specifically defends Helen Keller's vaudeville appearances with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, criticized as sensationalistic and undignified at an earlier time by Pitrois in her biography, Une nuit rayonnante: Helen Keller (1922). We are requesting a Small Grant to explore this problem of attitudes towards difference in the lives and works of these two woman more fully. This method is that of thematic analysis applied to biographical texts. This approach, coupled with care in maintaining a neutral stance towards the material, will enable us to explore the origins and the extent of the attitudinal difference of Pitrois and Keller and to shed some light on French and American views of deafness and blindness. It is our hope that tine investigation of this problem will add a creative way to the diversity dialogue currently occurring at Gallaudet University and in the society-at-large. |