HENA03829U English - Free topic: Problems of Representation in Contemporary Literature

What happens when writers put their imaginary worlds into words? How do they translate an object, an emotion a thought into language? Indeed, what happens when a three-dimensional body of flesh and blood is reduced to a two-dimensional character of ink and paper? Why do so many contemporary writers seem to be writing stories about writing stories?
These questions branch out into a wide range of related issues concerning the nature and process of writing this course sets out to explore. In doing so, we will no doubt take a close look at the fateful chapter 13 in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and probe methods of representation fictionalized in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert's Parrot; we may discuss notions of memory in the work of Paul Auster, try to navigate Jeanette Winterson’s labyrinthine canals in The Passion and we will most certainly examine the nature of interpretation in a couple of stories yet to be named.