58216 Imagining the Real

Handbook description

This subject focuses on the concept of the real. Students are asked to engage with the history, contexts, conventions and current debates centred on the notion of 'the real'. Students choose different approaches to these issues in terms of creative and theoretical perspectives. The subject aims to develop students' awareness of the wide possibilities and scope of non-fiction writing and enables them to produce an extended piece of non-fiction writing in a workshop environment. The laboratory acts as a context for researching how the notions of the real are associated with questions to do with society, culture and globalisation no less than to do with issues of subjectivity, the senses and corporeal knowledge. Each class acts as a space in which students test out received and experimental approaches to writing and thinking about the real. Truth telling, the use of fictional mode in non-fictional forms of writing, concepts of simulacrum, verisimilitude, revelation and authenticity, and the ethical contexts of documentation are key features of each class's work. Students are asked to nominate the area in which they intend to write and are assisted in researching and contextualising that area.