Theory from practice: A subjective academic narrative of crime fiction addiction

In this paper I consider elements of my reading crime fiction/detective novels, and I also consider if I can learn more about such fiction by applying critical theories so as to provide new and interesting ideas about them. In doing so I practise what I call a ‘subjective academic narrative’: a personal scholarly story that brings together the researcher and the story of that research in a way that extends traditional notions of scholarship. This enables me both to show how news ways of thinking about discourse within the academy are creatively enriching to knowledge practices and also to contextualise research alongside the researcher. This paper is about myself as a crime fiction reader confessing to and exploring my addiction and placing it within scholarly discourse. In doing so, I reveal my own subjective academic narrative. I’m an obsessive reader who always has to have print narratives before my eyes. I really don’t care what the genre is, but I do like to select books by length: the longer the better. I admit I’m also an addict for reading crime fiction: does that mean I’m sublimating my deepest desires to kill? This paper explores the self as data as a contribution to qualitative scholarly methodology.