Image,Language And Self-reconstruction

As one of the most influential contemporary British writers,Jeanette Winterson devotes herself to exploring,seeking and constructing herself through literary creation,never giving up her care for individual life.Although some people doubt that Winterson’s narrative style is complex and difficult to understand,behind the diversified narrative style is Winterson’s attempt to arouse readers to think more deeply about their inner world and self-consciousness.Winterson wrote Sexing the Cherry in 1989,which typically demonstrated her artistic style of narration.She inserted images into the text in the novel.The image and language complemented each other.One the one hand,the illustrations assisted language to better elaborate the story.On the other hand,language helped to describe the illustration thus to further convey the connotation of pictures,and achieve the visual reproduction effect of language.Based on such a special text,this paper does not stick to the traditional comparative study.Neither does it regard the illustration as a subsidiary existence,nor does it ignore the visual representation in the language,but faces the "image-language" narrative mode itself from a perspective beyond comparison.Beyond comparison,means paying attention to the overall relationship between image,language and its narrative intention in the novel.Therefore,this paper mainly explores the question from three aspects.Firstly,this paper will start from the image,combine with the narrative language of the novel,explore the deep connotation behind the image,and try to show Winterson’s unique understanding of the relationship between self and gender,love and history.Winterson emphasized the reconstruction of the subject’s self-consciousness and tried to break the binary opposite gender and heterosexual tradition.Based on this,Winterson further dispeled the grand historical narrative background and presented the individual life experience from the perspective of female characters at the bottom.Secondly,this paper transfers the foothold to language,specifically explores Winterson’s unique view of time and space and his speech on self-redemption and transcendence by combining with the three pictures described by language in the novel.Finally,this paper selects the other two texts of Winterson to analyze Winterson’s care for the individual self.No matter from the image,or from the language,or in other texts besides the image and language,the care for individual life and self-reconstruction are very important parts in Winterson’s creation.The humanistic care shown from this is also the meaning of Winterson’s works.