This chapter investigates how conspiracy theories circulate in the contemporary networked public ... more This chapter investigates how conspiracy theories circulate in the contemporary networked public sphere, how they shape news by becoming the news, and how they are framed by the broad rhetoric of narrative that dominates political discourse and public debate. Through a study of reportage on conspiracy theories in five major US dailies throughout the year 2020, the chapter demonstrates 1) how newspapers discursively construct readers as “susceptible citizens”: media consumers to be simultaneously warned against conspiracy theories, courted and corrected by exposure to quality journalism; and 2) how ongoing coverage of two particular conspiracy theories (the Wuhan lab leak and the stolen election) functioned as lightning rods for internecine struggles between media outlets in their own attempts to emplot and control “the narrative” of the daily news cycle.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, May 14, 2020
This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements fr... more This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements from the networked interactions of users with the algorithmic structures of social media platforms. It identifies and anatomizes a new narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances of Twitter, a phenomenon dubbed ‘emergent storytelling’. In doing so, it seeks to explain: (a) the multiple concepts of narrative that operate at different levels of hashtag movements emerging from the dynamic forces that circulate in and through Twitter; (b) the interplay of narrative cognition with stochastic viral activity and the invisible design of social media algorithms; and (c) the varying rhetorical purposes that narrative is put to in public discourse about viral movements. Using #MeToo as a case study in the generation and reception of ‘affective publics’, it clarifies how iterative appeals to the experiential truth of individual stories manifest as narratable social movements in the networked public sphere.
Why have all the major novelistic innovations in representing consciousness been achieved through... more Why have all the major novelistic innovations in representing consciousness been achieved through depicting the minds of female characters? This essay argues that eighteenth-century conduct books provided the cultural impetus and structural frame for a particular subjectivity--the self-examining heroine--that required the development of narrative techniques for rendering fictional minds. The essay traces the consciousness scene from the early novel to the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how the historical development of modes of thought representation has been synonymous with explorations of female sexual identity, played out most specifically in the relation between narrator and character fostered by free indirect discourse.
The novel is both a type of narrative and a distinct literary genre. This introduction argues tha... more The novel is both a type of narrative and a distinct literary genre. This introduction argues that theoretical accounts of formal elements of narrative fiction, on the one hand, and historical investigations into the development of the novel, on the other, suffer from a lack of methodological exchange. It sketches out the interrelated disciplinary histories of the fields of narrative theory and novel studies and anatomizes the theoretical ground they share in determining their objects of study before identifying four topics of convergence: fictionality, surface reading and computational narratol-ogy, diachronic narratology and novelistic history, political criticism and new technologies. These topics provide a frame for ongoing debates which the essays in this special issue seek to engage with and intervene in.
Narrative theory is habitually characterized as a "toolbox" or "toolkit" for the analysis of narr... more Narrative theory is habitually characterized as a "toolbox" or "toolkit" for the analysis of narratives. What does the prevalence of this metaphor tell us about the disciplinary aspirations of narratology? Whether explicitly or not, whenever the narratological toolbox is invoked it operates as a methodological or metadisciplinary statement. This article traces different uses of the metaphor to establish how narratology has constructed its disciplinary history and situated itself in relation to broader directions in literary and cultural studies, before addressing some of the paradoxes and limitations the reliance on this metaphor give rise to, particularly concerning the role of interpretation. It seeks to clarify our understanding of the methodological procedures involved in narratological analysis by distinguishing between theoretical concepts and formalist categories, and it addresses this distinction in the context of debates about the ontology of fiction.
Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative... more Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative that disrupt the illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees. In this way, intrusions highlight by contrast our sense of two formative elements of the novel: its narrative structure, and its referential status. This article argues that the historically variable types and functions of authorial commentary, together with their critical reception, provide an important means for investigating changing concepts of novelistic realism. It traces a broad terminological shift, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in which the common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as an intrusion into a narrative. In doing so, it demonstrates the paradoxical role authorial commentary has played in both establishing and challenging the conventions of realist fiction in relation to eighteenth-century theories of probability, nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, and twentieth-century theories of impersonality.
This essay situates recent rhetorical approaches to fictionality in relation to existing philosop... more This essay situates recent rhetorical approaches to fictionality in relation to existing philosophical and literary-critical debates in the field, with a focus on how these debates have informed contemporary narrative theory. In particular, the essay addresses the rhetorical approach in relation to: 1) its claims to break decisively from previous scholarship on fictionality; 2) the ramifications for the study of narrative fiction; and 3) its relationship to postmodernism and the narrative turn. While the essay takes the form of a polemic, its aim is not to dismiss the value or significance of fictionality as a field of study, but to locate its development in a disciplinary context and clarify the contributions it stands to make to narrative theory.
This paper argues that the question of individual authorial style poses a productive methodologic... more This paper argues that the question of individual authorial style poses a productive methodological challenge to theories of narrative voice. The context for this investigation is Genette’s approach to voice as the trace of a narrating instance, distinct from the instance of writing. The paper invokes Derrida’s contemporaneous concept of trace as differance to demonstrate how postclassical critiques of narrative voice simultaneously embrace and resist the logic of deconstruction. It further shows how narrative theory deploys different conceptions of style — as rhetoric or technique, as expressive features, and as material form or medium — to reconceptualize narrative voice while still keeping authorial style at bay. It argues for a theoretical separation of text and discourse, and an approach to style as the material trace of the act of composition which reveals the contingency of textual form.
This is a response to the questions asked by Franco Passalacqua and Federico Pianzola as a follow... more This is a response to the questions asked by Franco Passalacqua and Federico Pianzola as a follow-up of the 2013 ENN conference. The discussions that originated at the conference were rich and thought-provoking and so the editors of this special section of «Enthymema» decided to continue the dialogue about the state of the art and the future of narratology.
This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of ... more This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of narrative voice in a broader discursive context. It seeks to reformulate the classic model of narrative communication in order to redress the imbalance of current narratological scholarship, which focuses on theorizing the role of real readers without due attention to real authors.
I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least... more I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly redundant omniscient narrator. We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades.
Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself.
New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2008
This essay argues that Creative Writing pedagogy relies upon a dehistoricised approach to the not... more This essay argues that Creative Writing pedagogy relies upon a dehistoricised approach to the notion of 'craft' in which the formal elements of fiction, such as voice and point of view, are conceptualised as static and unchanging 'building blocks' for writers. Illustrative samples of writing are thus understood synchronically, disavowing the historical contingency and mutabiltity of formal categories. The essay argues that a diachronic approach to the teaching of craft will enable formal elements of fiction to be used as heuristic devices for historicising writing samples, thus opening up possibilities for refining and adapting these elements to the concerns of contemporary writers. As a case study, the essay analyses the way in which handbooks produced by teachers of Creative Writing adopt a 'pros' and 'con's' approach to the use of narrative voice. This approach, in the guise of 'practical advice', perpetuates a modernist aesthetic prejudice for impersonal modes of narration. The essay will draw attention to new modes of omniscient narration being developed in contemporary fiction which complicate this approach to the teaching of narrative voice.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Assocation of Writing Programs, 2008
This essay intervenes in current debates about the operation of creative writing as an academic d... more This essay intervenes in current debates about the operation of creative writing as an academic discipline, and provides a polemical critique of practice-led research as a basis for disciplinary identity. It argues that the emergence of creative writing studies as a field of academic research is the product of an ongoing tension created by the pull of centrifugal intellectual forces that are interdisciplinary in focus and centripetal institutional forces that are driving towards disciplinary independence.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Assocation of Writing Programs, 2003
We exist today in what has been called a post-Theory academy. This means that the conditions for ... more We exist today in what has been called a post-Theory academy. This means that the conditions for intellectual work in the contemporary humanities are constituted by two interrelated elements: a desire to move beyond the methodological restrictions of Theory and engage more practically with the public sphere; and the need to adapt to the institutional pressures of an increasingly corporatised university. The discipline of Creative Writing is well placed to contribute to this intellectual work, having emerged in Australian universities alongside the New Humanities as part of a challenge to traditional forms of literary education. The challenge for writing programmes is how to accommodate the insights of critical theory, identity politics and cultural studies, and the critiques of literature which these offer, while still retaining the central pedagogical aim of Creative Writing, which is to teach students how to develop their writing skills in order to produce literary works.
I am interested in developing a poetics which can be applied to all student work, from confessional poems to discontinuous narratives, without establishing a heirarchy in which 'experimental' modes of writing are more radical or politically efficacious than 'mainstream' genres. A poetics which engages with questions of literary quality and aesthetic power while still remaining committed to the oppositional criticism of the New Humanities. And a poetics which encourages the view of literature as a public intellectual practice, rather than a means for the empowerment of individual identities and subjectivities.
This is an essay about the fictocritical concept of a 'space between' the categories of literatur... more This is an essay about the fictocritical concept of a 'space between' the categories of literature and criticism, and the relationship of this metaphorical space to the institutional places in which fictocriticism circulates. The 'space between' refers to a space created by the epistemological collapse of critical distance in postmodern theory, a textual no-man's land in which a generic intermingling and hybridity of form takes place. Fictocriticism, however, could perhaps best be described as a term around which a number of theoretical and institutional negotiations between the creative and the critical take place. Rather than offering a single authoritative definition of the term, I will attempt here to describe how fictocriticism is constructed out of an ongoing series of provisional self-definitions.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Assocation of Writing Programs, 2001
The formation of the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 1996 marked the professionalis... more The formation of the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 1996 marked the professionalisation of Creative Writing as an academic discipline in Australian universities. The main issues which have arisen from this formation have been the need to define 'creative writing' (or work produced by teachers of writing) as a form of research in order to grapple with institutional questions of funding and promotion, and the related issue of how creative work, especially at the postgraduate level, is to be assessed. The result of this ongoing discussion about the professional disciplinary nature of Creative Writing has been a deliberate move to align the AAWP with representative professional bodies of schools of Visual and Performing Arts.
It was professional bodies for the Visual and Performing Arts which first mobilised to define artistic production as 'research equivalence', in order to stake out the claims of the Creative Arts sector in the research-oriented funding patterns of tertiary institutions (see Strand). The political identification of Creative Writing with the Visual and Performing Arts operates by claiming not only a fraternal association, but a similar institutional trajectory to schools and colleges of art, thus positing an historical narrative which is neither sustainable nor fruitful. In his recent survey of the Arts, Malcolm Gillies reports that the 'amalgamation of universities and CAEs in the late 1980s and early 1990s led, effectively, to the absorption of many schools of a practical orientation into a system strongly emphasising traditional models of teaching and research' (261-62). This narrative of absorption has been adopted to explain the origin of Creative Writing courses (see Krauth, Flann). An analysis of the development of writing programmes in individual universities and colleges, however, demonstrates an array of functions and purposes too disparate to be classified as an apprenticeship in writing which subsequently became absorbed into the research-oriented programmes of traditional universities. Instead, Creative Writing evolved out of a series of institutional and curricular responses to the perennial crisis in English studies, in the form of new pedagogical approaches to the study of literature in both CAEs and universities.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, 1999
In this paper I would like to discuss the discipline of Creative Writing in relation to current d... more In this paper I would like to discuss the discipline of Creative Writing in relation to current debates about research in the university system. The term research, as we know, has traditionally referred to the scientific method of systematic and objective investigation into a delimited field of inquiry in order to establish verifiable facts against which hypotheses can be tested and problems solved.
This chapter investigates how conspiracy theories circulate in the contemporary networked public ... more This chapter investigates how conspiracy theories circulate in the contemporary networked public sphere, how they shape news by becoming the news, and how they are framed by the broad rhetoric of narrative that dominates political discourse and public debate. Through a study of reportage on conspiracy theories in five major US dailies throughout the year 2020, the chapter demonstrates 1) how newspapers discursively construct readers as “susceptible citizens”: media consumers to be simultaneously warned against conspiracy theories, courted and corrected by exposure to quality journalism; and 2) how ongoing coverage of two particular conspiracy theories (the Wuhan lab leak and the stolen election) functioned as lightning rods for internecine struggles between media outlets in their own attempts to emplot and control “the narrative” of the daily news cycle.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, May 14, 2020
This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements fr... more This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements from the networked interactions of users with the algorithmic structures of social media platforms. It identifies and anatomizes a new narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances of Twitter, a phenomenon dubbed ‘emergent storytelling’. In doing so, it seeks to explain: (a) the multiple concepts of narrative that operate at different levels of hashtag movements emerging from the dynamic forces that circulate in and through Twitter; (b) the interplay of narrative cognition with stochastic viral activity and the invisible design of social media algorithms; and (c) the varying rhetorical purposes that narrative is put to in public discourse about viral movements. Using #MeToo as a case study in the generation and reception of ‘affective publics’, it clarifies how iterative appeals to the experiential truth of individual stories manifest as narratable social movements in the networked public sphere.
Why have all the major novelistic innovations in representing consciousness been achieved through... more Why have all the major novelistic innovations in representing consciousness been achieved through depicting the minds of female characters? This essay argues that eighteenth-century conduct books provided the cultural impetus and structural frame for a particular subjectivity--the self-examining heroine--that required the development of narrative techniques for rendering fictional minds. The essay traces the consciousness scene from the early novel to the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how the historical development of modes of thought representation has been synonymous with explorations of female sexual identity, played out most specifically in the relation between narrator and character fostered by free indirect discourse.
The novel is both a type of narrative and a distinct literary genre. This introduction argues tha... more The novel is both a type of narrative and a distinct literary genre. This introduction argues that theoretical accounts of formal elements of narrative fiction, on the one hand, and historical investigations into the development of the novel, on the other, suffer from a lack of methodological exchange. It sketches out the interrelated disciplinary histories of the fields of narrative theory and novel studies and anatomizes the theoretical ground they share in determining their objects of study before identifying four topics of convergence: fictionality, surface reading and computational narratol-ogy, diachronic narratology and novelistic history, political criticism and new technologies. These topics provide a frame for ongoing debates which the essays in this special issue seek to engage with and intervene in.
Narrative theory is habitually characterized as a "toolbox" or "toolkit" for the analysis of narr... more Narrative theory is habitually characterized as a "toolbox" or "toolkit" for the analysis of narratives. What does the prevalence of this metaphor tell us about the disciplinary aspirations of narratology? Whether explicitly or not, whenever the narratological toolbox is invoked it operates as a methodological or metadisciplinary statement. This article traces different uses of the metaphor to establish how narratology has constructed its disciplinary history and situated itself in relation to broader directions in literary and cultural studies, before addressing some of the paradoxes and limitations the reliance on this metaphor give rise to, particularly concerning the role of interpretation. It seeks to clarify our understanding of the methodological procedures involved in narratological analysis by distinguishing between theoretical concepts and formalist categories, and it addresses this distinction in the context of debates about the ontology of fiction.
Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative... more Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative that disrupt the illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees. In this way, intrusions highlight by contrast our sense of two formative elements of the novel: its narrative structure, and its referential status. This article argues that the historically variable types and functions of authorial commentary, together with their critical reception, provide an important means for investigating changing concepts of novelistic realism. It traces a broad terminological shift, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in which the common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as an intrusion into a narrative. In doing so, it demonstrates the paradoxical role authorial commentary has played in both establishing and challenging the conventions of realist fiction in relation to eighteenth-century theories of probability, nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, and twentieth-century theories of impersonality.
This essay situates recent rhetorical approaches to fictionality in relation to existing philosop... more This essay situates recent rhetorical approaches to fictionality in relation to existing philosophical and literary-critical debates in the field, with a focus on how these debates have informed contemporary narrative theory. In particular, the essay addresses the rhetorical approach in relation to: 1) its claims to break decisively from previous scholarship on fictionality; 2) the ramifications for the study of narrative fiction; and 3) its relationship to postmodernism and the narrative turn. While the essay takes the form of a polemic, its aim is not to dismiss the value or significance of fictionality as a field of study, but to locate its development in a disciplinary context and clarify the contributions it stands to make to narrative theory.
This paper argues that the question of individual authorial style poses a productive methodologic... more This paper argues that the question of individual authorial style poses a productive methodological challenge to theories of narrative voice. The context for this investigation is Genette’s approach to voice as the trace of a narrating instance, distinct from the instance of writing. The paper invokes Derrida’s contemporaneous concept of trace as differance to demonstrate how postclassical critiques of narrative voice simultaneously embrace and resist the logic of deconstruction. It further shows how narrative theory deploys different conceptions of style — as rhetoric or technique, as expressive features, and as material form or medium — to reconceptualize narrative voice while still keeping authorial style at bay. It argues for a theoretical separation of text and discourse, and an approach to style as the material trace of the act of composition which reveals the contingency of textual form.
This is a response to the questions asked by Franco Passalacqua and Federico Pianzola as a follow... more This is a response to the questions asked by Franco Passalacqua and Federico Pianzola as a follow-up of the 2013 ENN conference. The discussions that originated at the conference were rich and thought-provoking and so the editors of this special section of «Enthymema» decided to continue the dialogue about the state of the art and the future of narratology.
This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of ... more This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of narrative voice in a broader discursive context. It seeks to reformulate the classic model of narrative communication in order to redress the imbalance of current narratological scholarship, which focuses on theorizing the role of real readers without due attention to real authors.
I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least... more I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly redundant omniscient narrator. We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades.
Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself.
New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2008
This essay argues that Creative Writing pedagogy relies upon a dehistoricised approach to the not... more This essay argues that Creative Writing pedagogy relies upon a dehistoricised approach to the notion of 'craft' in which the formal elements of fiction, such as voice and point of view, are conceptualised as static and unchanging 'building blocks' for writers. Illustrative samples of writing are thus understood synchronically, disavowing the historical contingency and mutabiltity of formal categories. The essay argues that a diachronic approach to the teaching of craft will enable formal elements of fiction to be used as heuristic devices for historicising writing samples, thus opening up possibilities for refining and adapting these elements to the concerns of contemporary writers. As a case study, the essay analyses the way in which handbooks produced by teachers of Creative Writing adopt a 'pros' and 'con's' approach to the use of narrative voice. This approach, in the guise of 'practical advice', perpetuates a modernist aesthetic prejudice for impersonal modes of narration. The essay will draw attention to new modes of omniscient narration being developed in contemporary fiction which complicate this approach to the teaching of narrative voice.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Assocation of Writing Programs, 2008
This essay intervenes in current debates about the operation of creative writing as an academic d... more This essay intervenes in current debates about the operation of creative writing as an academic discipline, and provides a polemical critique of practice-led research as a basis for disciplinary identity. It argues that the emergence of creative writing studies as a field of academic research is the product of an ongoing tension created by the pull of centrifugal intellectual forces that are interdisciplinary in focus and centripetal institutional forces that are driving towards disciplinary independence.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Assocation of Writing Programs, 2003
We exist today in what has been called a post-Theory academy. This means that the conditions for ... more We exist today in what has been called a post-Theory academy. This means that the conditions for intellectual work in the contemporary humanities are constituted by two interrelated elements: a desire to move beyond the methodological restrictions of Theory and engage more practically with the public sphere; and the need to adapt to the institutional pressures of an increasingly corporatised university. The discipline of Creative Writing is well placed to contribute to this intellectual work, having emerged in Australian universities alongside the New Humanities as part of a challenge to traditional forms of literary education. The challenge for writing programmes is how to accommodate the insights of critical theory, identity politics and cultural studies, and the critiques of literature which these offer, while still retaining the central pedagogical aim of Creative Writing, which is to teach students how to develop their writing skills in order to produce literary works.
I am interested in developing a poetics which can be applied to all student work, from confessional poems to discontinuous narratives, without establishing a heirarchy in which 'experimental' modes of writing are more radical or politically efficacious than 'mainstream' genres. A poetics which engages with questions of literary quality and aesthetic power while still remaining committed to the oppositional criticism of the New Humanities. And a poetics which encourages the view of literature as a public intellectual practice, rather than a means for the empowerment of individual identities and subjectivities.
This is an essay about the fictocritical concept of a 'space between' the categories of literatur... more This is an essay about the fictocritical concept of a 'space between' the categories of literature and criticism, and the relationship of this metaphorical space to the institutional places in which fictocriticism circulates. The 'space between' refers to a space created by the epistemological collapse of critical distance in postmodern theory, a textual no-man's land in which a generic intermingling and hybridity of form takes place. Fictocriticism, however, could perhaps best be described as a term around which a number of theoretical and institutional negotiations between the creative and the critical take place. Rather than offering a single authoritative definition of the term, I will attempt here to describe how fictocriticism is constructed out of an ongoing series of provisional self-definitions.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Assocation of Writing Programs, 2001
The formation of the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 1996 marked the professionalis... more The formation of the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 1996 marked the professionalisation of Creative Writing as an academic discipline in Australian universities. The main issues which have arisen from this formation have been the need to define 'creative writing' (or work produced by teachers of writing) as a form of research in order to grapple with institutional questions of funding and promotion, and the related issue of how creative work, especially at the postgraduate level, is to be assessed. The result of this ongoing discussion about the professional disciplinary nature of Creative Writing has been a deliberate move to align the AAWP with representative professional bodies of schools of Visual and Performing Arts.
It was professional bodies for the Visual and Performing Arts which first mobilised to define artistic production as 'research equivalence', in order to stake out the claims of the Creative Arts sector in the research-oriented funding patterns of tertiary institutions (see Strand). The political identification of Creative Writing with the Visual and Performing Arts operates by claiming not only a fraternal association, but a similar institutional trajectory to schools and colleges of art, thus positing an historical narrative which is neither sustainable nor fruitful. In his recent survey of the Arts, Malcolm Gillies reports that the 'amalgamation of universities and CAEs in the late 1980s and early 1990s led, effectively, to the absorption of many schools of a practical orientation into a system strongly emphasising traditional models of teaching and research' (261-62). This narrative of absorption has been adopted to explain the origin of Creative Writing courses (see Krauth, Flann). An analysis of the development of writing programmes in individual universities and colleges, however, demonstrates an array of functions and purposes too disparate to be classified as an apprenticeship in writing which subsequently became absorbed into the research-oriented programmes of traditional universities. Instead, Creative Writing evolved out of a series of institutional and curricular responses to the perennial crisis in English studies, in the form of new pedagogical approaches to the study of literature in both CAEs and universities.
TEXT: Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, 1999
In this paper I would like to discuss the discipline of Creative Writing in relation to current d... more In this paper I would like to discuss the discipline of Creative Writing in relation to current debates about research in the university system. The term research, as we know, has traditionally referred to the scientific method of systematic and objective investigation into a delimited field of inquiry in order to establish verifiable facts against which hypotheses can be tested and problems solved.
"The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction ... more "The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction by Paul Dawson argues that the omniscient narrator, long considered a relic of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, has reemerged as an important feature of contemporary British and American literary fiction. It further argues that the development of contemporary omniscience can be situated in relation to ongoing anxieties about the novel’s decline of cultural authority in the age of digital media. In this context the book identifies and classifies new modes of omniscient narration that are neither nostalgic revivals nor parodic critiques of classic omniscience, but the result of experimentations with narrative voice in the wake of postmodern fiction.
To address this phenomenon, the book reformulates existing definitions of literary omniscience, shifting attention away from questions of narratorial knowledge and toward omniscient narration as a rhetorical performance of narrative authority that invokes and projects a historically specific figure of authorship. Through a study of fiction by authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Martin Amis, Rick Moody, Edward P. Jones, and Nicola Barker, the book analyzes how the conventional narrative authority of omniscient narrators is parlayed into claims for the cultural authority of authors and of the novel itself.
In the course of its investigation, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator engages with major movements in narrative theory—rhetorical, cognitive, and feminist—to challenge and reconsider many key narratological categories, including Free Indirect Discourse, the relation between voice and focalization, and the narrative communication model. This challenge is framed by an argument for a discursive approach to narrative fiction that addresses the neglect of authorship in narrative theory.
Introduction: The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter One: Omniscience and Narrative Authority
Chapter Two: The Direct Address and the Ironic Moralist
Chapter Three: Prolepsis and the Literary Historian
Chapter Four: Style and the Pyrotechnic Storyteller
Chapter Five: Polymathic Knowledge and the Immersion Journalist/ Social Commentator
Chapter Six: Voice and Free Indirect Discourse in Contemporary Omniscient Narration
Chapter Seven: Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration
Chapter Eight: Real Authors and Real Readers: A Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model""
This book examines the institutional history and disciplinary future of creative writing in the c... more This book examines the institutional history and disciplinary future of creative writing in the contemporary academy, looking well beyond the perennial questions 'can writing be taught?' and 'should writing be taught?'.
Paul Dawson traces the emergence of creative writing alongside the new criticism in American universities; examines the writing workshop in relation to theories of creativity and literary criticism; and analyzes the evolution of creative writing pedagogy alongside and in response to the rise of 'theory' in America, England and Australia.
Dawson argues that the discipline of creative writing developed as a series of pedagogic responses to the long-standing 'crisis' in literary studies. His polemical account provides a fresh perspective on the importance of creative writing to the emergence of the 'new humanities' and makes a major contribution to current debates about the role of the writer as public intellectual.
"an extraordinarily important contribution to the future development of creative writing theory.”
– Daniel Soukup, Rukopis: Review of Writing Practice (2006)
"This is an excellent foundation on which we as members of a discipline can - dare I say, should? - build.”
– Jen Webb, TEXT (October 2005)
“Paul Dawson's book is a well-researched and stimulating attempt to answer the host of questions that suggest themselves when trying to find the exact location of Creative Writing within the contemporary academy in the specific field of literary studies."
– José Antonio Álvarez Amorós, The European English Messenger (2006)
The poems in Imagining Winter investigate contemporary urban existence, including the politics of... more The poems in Imagining Winter investigate contemporary urban existence, including the politics of national identity and the culture of inner city life in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Each of the three sections considers a different perspective of metropolitan landscapes and relationships.
Poems within the first section, Explorations, manifest a reflexive awareness of the genre or of the process of writing itself: poems which consciously explore the ways in which a poetic state of mind can engage with experience and thought.
The second section, Assertions, includes declarative poems which deliver a political point or social commentary.
Poems in the third section, Preoccupations, mirror more personal emotions, and ponder the nature of human relations.
The Handbook of Creative Writing (ed. Steve Earnshaw), 2007
It is no longer possible for Creative Writing to maintain its romantic ideal of a garret in the i... more It is no longer possible for Creative Writing to maintain its romantic ideal of a garret in the ivory tower, a community of writers made possible by the patronage of the university. And it is not sufficient to define Creative Writing pedagogy as the passing down of a guild craft from established practitioners to a new generation of writers. Writing programs now exist in an intellectual environment of interdisciplinarity, critical self-reflection and oppositional politics on the one hand, and in an institutional environment of learning outcomes, transferable skills and competitive research funding on the other. What effects will this academic environment have on how the subject is taught, and on the creative work produced? This is the crucial question confronting teachers of writing in the New Humanities.
Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice (eds Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady), 2006
What happens when writers of literature write about literature? From book reviews, interviews, an... more What happens when writers of literature write about literature? From book reviews, interviews, and talks at seminars and writers’ festivals, to prefaces, manifestos, handbooks and academic essays, there is no shortage of commentary from writers about their craft. Writers often claim to be concerned with the practice of writing rather than theories of literature, with the creative process rather than the literary product. It might thus be reasonable to argue that writers offer a practical knowledge of the craft of writing which cannot be gained from literary criticism and theory. However, when writers talk about their craft they are also inevitably articulating the theories which to varying degrees of reflexivity underpin their creative practice. The pronouncements of writers, then, in whatever mode of address they employ, must also be seen as contributions to the field of literary criticism.
This paper offers a polemical critique of current scholarship on fictionality in the broader cont... more This paper offers a polemical critique of current scholarship on fictionality in the broader context of the narrative turn. In particular it addresses recent attempts to separate the concept of fictionality from its association with the genre of fiction. In the process it engages with some key debates in the field, including: the methodological distinction between pragmatics and semantics; the question of signposts of fictionality; and the relatonship between fictionality and narrativity.
This paper argues that the question of individual authorial style poses a productive methodologic... more This paper argues that the question of individual authorial style poses a productive methodological challenge to theories of narrative voice. The context for this investigation is Genette’s approach to voice as the trace of a narrating instance, distinct from the instance of writing. The paper invokes Derrida’s contemporaneous concept of trace as differance to demonstrate how postclassical critiques of narrative voice simultaneously embrace and resist the logic of deconstruction. It further shows how narrative theory deploys different conceptions of style – as rhetoric or technique, as expressive features, and as material form or medium – to reconceptualize narrative voice while still keeping authorial style at bay. It argues for a theoretical separation of text and discourse, and an approach to style as the material trace of the act of composition which reveals the contingency of textual form.
This paper will discuss the increasingly prominent mode of homodiegetic omniscient narration and ... more This paper will discuss the increasingly prominent mode of homodiegetic omniscient narration and the ways in which it has been theorized. When first person narrators adopt the privilege of omniscience typically associated with authorial narration, and narrate with authority the thoughts of other characters or events at which they were not present, our default response seems to be: how do they know? This paper will argue that the ways in which narrative theory has engaged with this question demonstrate the extent to which it is in thrall to an “epistemological fallacy”, where questions regarding practices of story telling are framed as a problematics of knowledge. The debates which result from this approach point to a narratological preoccupation with attribution: to whom do we assign vision, voice, consciousness, intentionality, etc, resulting in a multiplication of possible agents: author, implied author, narrator, focalizer, character and reader. In this case, the ‘problem’ has been: to which agent do we assign responsibility for impossible knowledge?
The key term for conceptualizing homodiegetic omniscience has been that of paralepsis. This paper will trace the development of the term from its classical structuralist definition as an infraction of the governing code of focalization to its use in ‘unnatural’ narratology to denote an unnatural mind which violates the real world frames of reference readers bring to a text. In arguing that homodiegetic omniscience needs to be divorced from its synonomous relationship with paralepsis, the paper will invoke and reconfigure the concept of hypothetical focalization to explain how first person narrators perform omniscience in the act of narration.
In arguing that existing theoretical frameworks have lead to misreadings of novels identified as paraleptic, this paper will offer an historicized account of homodiegetic omniscience as a mode of post-postmodern fiction emerging in the wake of metafiction and situated alongside contemporary experiments in third person omniscient narration.
The difficulties of an academic career in Creative Writing are never so clear as when the time co... more The difficulties of an academic career in Creative Writing are never so clear as when the time comes for the annual data collection of government-approved research publications (HERDC). We are all familiar with the paradox: there are no categories for our Premier’s Award winning novel, but if our colleague down the hall writes a refereed journal article about that novel, they can fulfill their minimum output for the year and be considered research active. In order to correct the inequity of this situation, the burden of proof is upon us to argue for another paradox, that our creative work is something which it is not: academic research.
In devising strategic responses to this challenge, we are also placing the burden of proof on our creative outputs to be considered the source of disciplinary knowledge in Creative Writing. The journal article about our novel is clearly a contribution to literary studies; but is our novel really a contribution to Creative Writing? We can only answer this question if we can define Creative Writing as an academic discipline.
In this talk I will discuss questions of disciplinarity in relation to the research model which exists for research higher degree students, and in relation to the research-teaching nexus. I will draw upon the current PhD requirements and academic workload model at UNSW to discuss these issues in practical terms.
Once considered the domain of literary studies, narrative has become a topic of burgeoning intere... more Once considered the domain of literary studies, narrative has become a topic of burgeoning interest across the humanities and social sciences. There has now emerged an interdisciplinary consensus not only that narratives of all forms permeate our lives, but that the capacity for storytelling is an evolved cognitive faculty for making sense of human experience. This paper will consider the impact of this broad narrative turn on the study of narrative fiction. It investigates how the related studies of two constitutive features of the novel – its narrative form and its fictionality – have simultaneously expanded the significance of fiction and erased its specificity in the wake of postmodernism. It demonstrates how the interdisciplinary rhetoric of the narrative turn has fuelled both the perennial anxiety of accountability in literary studies and long-standing evangelical claims for the ethical importance of reading fiction.
This paper argues that theoretical accounts of Free Indirect Discourse have established an interp... more This paper argues that theoretical accounts of Free Indirect Discourse have established an interpretive frame of alterity which perpetuates aesthetic and ethical prejudices regarding the historical progression of novelistic form towards the liberation of characters from narratorial control. In fact, the central method for identifying and analysing Free Indirect Discourse – that of linguistic attribution – contains a latent capacity for evaluative prejudice which makes it unsuitable for studying many examples of the phenomenon itself. The paper proposes a model of FID as a self-conscious narratorial performance of the process of character thought and analyses the self-reflexive experimentation with Free Indirect Discourse in contemporary maximalist fiction, including work by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Nicola Barker and Tom Wolfe.
A feature of this experimentation is shared linguistic habitus, in which readers’ assumptions regarding idiomatic attribution are challenged by a deliberate interplay between stylistic contagion (the ‘infection’ of narratorial language by a character’s idiom) and narratorial usurpation (the narrator’s linguistic intrusion in a character’s interior monologue). As well as interrogating the relation between speech and thought, this self-reflexive experimentation facilitates a post-postmodern concept of characterological cognitive self-awareness, in which characters not only think, but reflect upon their own cognitive processes, including their lexical choices, in the act of reflection.
I will begin this paper by reading a recent poem of mine, called “Lines of Desire”, and then use ... more I will begin this paper by reading a recent poem of mine, called “Lines of Desire”, and then use this poem as a starting point to talk about contemporary lyric poetry as a form of knowledge, gesturing towards a theory of the ‘poetic moment’ in which knowledge emerges out of affect.
This is my way of working through a response to three current intellectual enterprises. First, the tendency of contemporary criticism to wed itself to avant-garde poetries and thus dismiss lyric poetry as a theoretically naïve mainstream form. Secondly, the attempt by narratologists to absorb lyric poetry into a general transmedial theory of narrative. And thirdly, the assertion within the Creative Arts that an artwork, in this case poetry, is a mode of research which underpins disciplinary identity.
The opening to a novel is the most important and the most agonising part of a writer's task. Wher... more The opening to a novel is the most important and the most agonising part of a writer's task. Where to begin? That arbitrary decision of infinite possibilities can stall the most inspired of projects.
What happens when we share a story online? And how does that story become part of a larger narrat... more What happens when we share a story online? And how does that story become part of a larger narrative? This article seeks to explain how the digital architecture of social media produces narrative phenomena that complicate conventional understandings of collective voice derived from the study of literary fiction, and which require new theories of co-construction to be adapted from existing sociolinguistic approaches to narrative. Online communication has a tendency to amplify storytelling in often-unpredictable ways. In the story logic of social media, readers become sharers, and their traceable acts of reframing turn audiences into co-tellers with a potentially significant narrative authority. If storytelling becomes an art of reframing, and the rhetoric and ethics of narrative are negotiated in the paratext, our understanding of narrative agency, and of narrative itself, must be reconfigured.
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Papers by Paul Dawson
Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself.
I am interested in developing a poetics which can be applied to all student work, from confessional poems to discontinuous narratives, without establishing a heirarchy in which 'experimental' modes of writing are more radical or politically efficacious than 'mainstream' genres. A poetics which engages with questions of literary quality and aesthetic power while still remaining committed to the oppositional criticism of the New Humanities. And a poetics which encourages the view of literature as a public intellectual practice, rather than a means for the empowerment of individual identities and subjectivities.
It was professional bodies for the Visual and Performing Arts which first mobilised to define artistic production as 'research equivalence', in order to stake out the claims of the Creative Arts sector in the research-oriented funding patterns of tertiary institutions (see Strand). The political identification of Creative Writing with the Visual and Performing Arts operates by claiming not only a fraternal association, but a similar institutional trajectory to schools and colleges of art, thus positing an historical narrative which is neither sustainable nor fruitful. In his recent survey of the Arts, Malcolm Gillies reports that the 'amalgamation of universities and CAEs in the late 1980s and early 1990s led, effectively, to the absorption of many schools of a practical orientation into a system strongly emphasising traditional models of teaching and research' (261-62). This narrative of absorption has been adopted to explain the origin of Creative Writing courses (see Krauth, Flann). An analysis of the development of writing programmes in individual universities and colleges, however, demonstrates an array of functions and purposes too disparate to be classified as an apprenticeship in writing which subsequently became absorbed into the research-oriented programmes of traditional universities. Instead, Creative Writing evolved out of a series of institutional and curricular responses to the perennial crisis in English studies, in the form of new pedagogical approaches to the study of literature in both CAEs and universities.
Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself.
I am interested in developing a poetics which can be applied to all student work, from confessional poems to discontinuous narratives, without establishing a heirarchy in which 'experimental' modes of writing are more radical or politically efficacious than 'mainstream' genres. A poetics which engages with questions of literary quality and aesthetic power while still remaining committed to the oppositional criticism of the New Humanities. And a poetics which encourages the view of literature as a public intellectual practice, rather than a means for the empowerment of individual identities and subjectivities.
It was professional bodies for the Visual and Performing Arts which first mobilised to define artistic production as 'research equivalence', in order to stake out the claims of the Creative Arts sector in the research-oriented funding patterns of tertiary institutions (see Strand). The political identification of Creative Writing with the Visual and Performing Arts operates by claiming not only a fraternal association, but a similar institutional trajectory to schools and colleges of art, thus positing an historical narrative which is neither sustainable nor fruitful. In his recent survey of the Arts, Malcolm Gillies reports that the 'amalgamation of universities and CAEs in the late 1980s and early 1990s led, effectively, to the absorption of many schools of a practical orientation into a system strongly emphasising traditional models of teaching and research' (261-62). This narrative of absorption has been adopted to explain the origin of Creative Writing courses (see Krauth, Flann). An analysis of the development of writing programmes in individual universities and colleges, however, demonstrates an array of functions and purposes too disparate to be classified as an apprenticeship in writing which subsequently became absorbed into the research-oriented programmes of traditional universities. Instead, Creative Writing evolved out of a series of institutional and curricular responses to the perennial crisis in English studies, in the form of new pedagogical approaches to the study of literature in both CAEs and universities.
To address this phenomenon, the book reformulates existing definitions of literary omniscience, shifting attention away from questions of narratorial knowledge and toward omniscient narration as a rhetorical performance of narrative authority that invokes and projects a historically specific figure of authorship. Through a study of fiction by authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Martin Amis, Rick Moody, Edward P. Jones, and Nicola Barker, the book analyzes how the conventional narrative authority of omniscient narrators is parlayed into claims for the cultural authority of authors and of the novel itself.
In the course of its investigation, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator engages with major movements in narrative theory—rhetorical, cognitive, and feminist—to challenge and reconsider many key narratological categories, including Free Indirect Discourse, the relation between voice and focalization, and the narrative communication model. This challenge is framed by an argument for a discursive approach to narrative fiction that addresses the neglect of authorship in narrative theory.
Introduction: The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter One: Omniscience and Narrative Authority
Chapter Two: The Direct Address and the Ironic Moralist
Chapter Three: Prolepsis and the Literary Historian
Chapter Four: Style and the Pyrotechnic Storyteller
Chapter Five: Polymathic Knowledge and the Immersion Journalist/ Social Commentator
Chapter Six: Voice and Free Indirect Discourse in Contemporary Omniscient Narration
Chapter Seven: Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration
Chapter Eight: Real Authors and Real Readers: A Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model""
Paul Dawson traces the emergence of creative writing alongside the new criticism in American universities; examines the writing workshop in relation to theories of creativity and literary criticism; and analyzes the evolution of creative writing pedagogy alongside and in response to the rise of 'theory' in America, England and Australia.
Dawson argues that the discipline of creative writing developed as a series of pedagogic responses to the long-standing 'crisis' in literary studies. His polemical account provides a fresh perspective on the importance of creative writing to the emergence of the 'new humanities' and makes a major contribution to current debates about the role of the writer as public intellectual.
"an extraordinarily important contribution to the future development of creative writing theory.”
– Daniel Soukup, Rukopis: Review of Writing Practice (2006)
"This is an excellent foundation on which we as members of a discipline can - dare I say, should? - build.”
– Jen Webb, TEXT (October 2005)
“Paul Dawson's book is a well-researched and stimulating attempt to answer the host of questions that suggest themselves when trying to find the exact location of Creative Writing within the contemporary academy in the specific field of literary studies."
– José Antonio Álvarez Amorós, The European English Messenger (2006)
Each of the three sections considers a different perspective of metropolitan landscapes and relationships.
Poems within the first section, Explorations, manifest a reflexive awareness of the genre or of the process of writing itself: poems which consciously explore the ways in which a poetic state of mind can engage with experience and thought.
The second section, Assertions, includes declarative poems which deliver a political point or social commentary.
Poems in the third section, Preoccupations, mirror more personal emotions, and ponder the nature of human relations.
The key term for conceptualizing homodiegetic omniscience has been that of paralepsis. This paper will trace the development of the term from its classical structuralist definition as an infraction of the governing code of focalization to its use in ‘unnatural’ narratology to denote an unnatural mind which violates the real world frames of reference readers bring to a text. In arguing that homodiegetic omniscience needs to be divorced from its synonomous relationship with paralepsis, the paper will invoke and reconfigure the concept of hypothetical focalization to explain how first person narrators perform omniscience in the act of narration.
In arguing that existing theoretical frameworks have lead to misreadings of novels identified as paraleptic, this paper will offer an historicized account of homodiegetic omniscience as a mode of post-postmodern fiction emerging in the wake of metafiction and situated alongside contemporary experiments in third person omniscient narration.
In devising strategic responses to this challenge, we are also placing the burden of proof on our creative outputs to be considered the source of disciplinary knowledge in Creative Writing. The journal article about our novel is clearly a contribution to literary studies; but is our novel really a contribution to Creative Writing? We can only answer this question if we can define Creative Writing as an academic discipline.
In this talk I will discuss questions of disciplinarity in relation to the research model which exists for research higher degree students, and in relation to the research-teaching nexus. I will draw upon the current PhD requirements and academic workload model at UNSW to discuss these issues in practical terms.
A feature of this experimentation is shared linguistic habitus, in which readers’ assumptions regarding idiomatic attribution are challenged by a deliberate interplay between stylistic contagion (the ‘infection’ of narratorial language by a character’s idiom) and narratorial usurpation (the narrator’s linguistic intrusion in a character’s interior monologue). As well as interrogating the relation between speech and thought, this self-reflexive experimentation facilitates a post-postmodern concept of characterological cognitive self-awareness, in which characters not only think, but reflect upon their own cognitive processes, including their lexical choices, in the act of reflection.
This is my way of working through a response to three current intellectual enterprises. First, the tendency of contemporary criticism to wed itself to avant-garde poetries and thus dismiss lyric poetry as a theoretically naïve mainstream form. Secondly, the attempt by narratologists to absorb lyric poetry into a general transmedial theory of narrative. And thirdly, the assertion within the Creative Arts that an artwork, in this case poetry, is a mode of research which underpins disciplinary identity.