ENGLISH 769

Representing Imagining

Please note: this is archived course information from 2020 for ENGLISH 769.

Description

How do modern writers and readers perform representational styles, from the familiar to the new? How do we respond to recognisable writing and to “imagining what we don’t know”? How does imaginative writing conjure and interrogate representation? Can representation collapse or vanish? If it can, what events or imaginative purposes – ecstatic, traumatic and/or otherwise – position us in the unrecognisable and/or unspeakable?

Using these and similar questions, this seminar investigates styles of representation in imaginative writing. For our purposes, representation is language and other signs replicating and/or investigating what and how we perceive, experience and co-create our worlds.

The principal focus is how individuals score themselves and their cultures in language and other imaginative signs near language: we’ll consider this topic in terms of genre, authenticity, translingualism, transnationalism, the word, the page and the codex, testimony, the digitas, distributed centrality, cultural ethics and the economy of the imaginative subject. Our texts range principally over the last forty years, with some earlier texts and contexts.

Assessment

Coursework only

Availability 2020

Semester 1

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Professor Lisa Samuels

Reading/Texts

TBA

Points

ENGLISH 769: 30 points