Unspeakable Things: A critical and creative exploration of the limitations of language and how we can navigate them to better communicate meaning

Abstract

Disturbing, haunting, mesmerising, surreal — the sentiment behind the words used by readers in response to Unspeakable Things calls up the collection’s sublime subject matter. Suggestive of the unutterable and the unknown respectively, the title of the collection speaks to this focus, which the fourteen narratives within evoke in order to transform complex contemporary issues such as social inequality, mental health, modern sexuality, and an endemic disregard for human life into affecting and accessible themes. Their use of the sublime achieves this by elevating the reader beyond thought and language at choice moments in each text, encouraging an emotional, spiritual, or philosophical response that serves to raise the reader’s awareness of — and engagement with— key themes.

Herein lies the new knowledge the accompanying critical commentary contributes to the creative writing field, putting forward the means by which the discourse of the sublime can not only be appropriated to examine key issues in critical contexts but used as a literary device by the modern creative writer to articulate contemporary themes and issues otherwise challenged with being too complex, far-reaching, or inaccessible to communicate authentically in narrative form. The creative collection is itself a contribution of new knowledge to the field for the way in which it demonstrates this.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Shelley Cobb: orcid.org/0000-0003-1153-8482

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