The Liberating Power of Imagination in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The work of Jeanette Winterson repeatedly challenges and disrupts the conventional approach to the world. It shows that our understanding of reality is based on a set of assumptions and illusions which help us make sense of the world and bring us comforting feelings of order and stability. However, Winterson demonstrates that these assumptions which we accept as universally valid may result in potentially harmful social trends such as a superficial pursuit of pleasure and success, general apathy, alienation, and lack of environmental awareness. One of the key forces that Winterson portrays as possessing the power to liberate us from our habitual ways of thinking and consequently counterforce our destructive behavior is art. The aim of this paper is to explore this transformative potential of art in Winterson’s novels and analyze the impact it might have on its consumers. By stimulating imagination and creating “a world apart” where the rules of the everyday life no longer apply, art has the potential to broaden our minds and help us perceive reality in a new light. As the paper will argue, once we let art impress and move us and we start approaching reality with an open mind, we might become able to explore the unrestricted universe of the imagination and finally perceive reality as it really is – as complex, multiple, constantly changing and partly ungraspable. |
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