Reading With Our Eyes Closed: Opacity and the Partiality of Knowledge in Literary Interpretation

This article proposes a reading mode that privileges opacity, uncertainty, and sensory experience over interpretive mastery - a way of reading ‘with eyes closed.’ Challenging dominant modes of suspicious reading that seek to unveil hidden truths, it draws inspiration from Édouard Glissant and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to advocate for a non-totalizing engagement with literary texts. A close reading of Ya’akov Steinberg’s short story The Blind Woman will demonstrate how reading, whether of a text or a place, can challenge epistemological hierarchies and value embodied, affective and folkloric knowledge. It suggests that reading with eyes closed allows for a different kind of knowledge to emerge – one that is attentive to place not only as setting, but as a lived, felt dimension. Centering blindness as a parable of reading, this article reimagines the role of literature as holding space for darkness.