Empty Space and Points of Light: The Self, Time, Sex, and Gender in Selected Works by Jeanette Winterson

Empty Space and Points of Light – The Self, Time, Sex, and Gender in Selected Works by Jeanette Winterson is a study of key issues in Winterson’s oeuvre. The selected works include Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Art & Lies, The PowerBook, and Written on the Body, works that are all concerned with the self in relation to the concepts of time, love, gender and the body. Drawing on Jungian ideas of quest and individuation and Queer theory, Marie Herholdt Jørgensen shows how these concepts in the works of Winterson are grounded in the prospect of numerous potential realities in which several narrations of the self are made possible. Winterson disrupts the notion of one objective reality and instead centers on the individual as the narrator of various versions of reality and the self. Thus, Herholdt Jørgensen’s study reveals how reality can be seen as a construct in Winterson’s novels, as reality is invented through the individual’s story of and by itself; a story that can be told and re-told endlessly. Similarly, gender and the body are exposed as narratives trying to escape society’s outer taxonomies through a continuous undermining of the boundaries between body and narrative. Empty Space and Points of Light contains summaries of all of Winterson’s novels, making the book accessible for readers previously unfamiliar with Jeanette Winterson. Marie Herholdt Jørgensen has a Master of Arts in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern Denmark and Copenhagen University. She has worked for KVINFO, the Danish Information Center on Women and Gender and has taught English and Danish. Currently, she develops teaching materials on Queer issues and is employed at the Danish Resource and Information Center for Autism. Empty Space and Points of Light is her first major publication. It is an edited version of her final thesis for the University of Copenhagen. Forlagets emneord: Litteraturvidenskab - Diskursteori - Kønsstudier - Religionshistorie - Selvbiografi - Homoseksualitet - Individuation - Tidsbegreb - Judith Butler - Jeanette Winterson