posted on 2024-07-13, 01:19authored byElizabeth Dianne Colbert
Creative practitioners, undertaking practice-led research, theorise their practice within an academic domain. Within a three-tiered, performative research paradigm, this project researched writerly identity during the writing of a novel and exegesis. Firstly, based on the writer's experience with creative and academic writing, the differences were explored through two first-person narratives in a frametale novel, The Fragility Papers, a process documented by critical and reflective journaling. Secondly, the insights gained during the writing of the novel were theorised within the domain of creative writers. Thirdly, the understandings embedded in the novel were considered in the light of these insights and those gained during writing of the exegesis and further theorised within the areas of voice, the writing process and ontological change. Novel writing, it was found, drew not only on the imagination, research, in-flow stream of consciousness writing and serendipitous occurrences but also on personal embodied inscriptions, linguistic play, logic and reason in the development of narrative coherence, forward planning, previously unidentified editing values based in the sonority of language, and a knowledge of the expectations associated with the literary genre. Acknowledging this breadth of experience led to changes in the writer's creative-writing process, a questioning of the theorised sole influence of language based texts as proposed in intertextual theory, and the proposal to italicise 'text' within intertextual to accommodate this breadth. The theorising of insights and emerging, experiential knowledge during the writing of the exegesis was realised in a series of evolving drafts in which interiorised knowledge was increasingly drawn upon in stream of consciousness writing. Further, in both genres, the dialogic engagement of the writer in conscious and unconscious activity at different stages of the writing process was found, suggesting that unconscious activity has a larger than envisaged role to play in academic writing.
History
Thesis type
Thesis (PhD)
Thesis note
Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Swinburne University of Technology, 2009.