The ether was proposed by Enlightenment natural philosophers as an undetectable substance filling the space between the stars, that held them in place and supported the propagation of their light across space. In The Subtle Ether: A Memoir of the Space Between, insights from the history of the ether are threaded through my experience of clearing the family home after the death of my parents, and inform a reflection on ‘spaces between' memories, family members, and between ourselves and the world. This thesis both proposes and practises writing creative nonfiction as a method of first person enquiry that bears a familial resemblance to contemplative traditions, and that can acknowledge and mourn the hiddenness of things by writing into the ‘space between' ourselves and the world. Seeking a new synthesis which meshes experience, emotion, observation, and reflection on the insights of science, I employ mixed modes of lyrical, aesthetic, philosophical and personal inquiry. The central claim of this thesis is that awareness and acceptance of hiddenness as the nature of all things counteracts human hubris. While drawing from the example of continuous, open-ended questioning the scientific search for the ‘ether' offers, this thesis both argues and demonstrates that scientific and analytical methods alone cannot address this hiddenness, and that creative practice can be an effective way to think about and communicate what cannot be directly known. I argue that the desire for complete knowledge is a form of acquisitiveness and control, and that recognising the limited scope of human senses and reason undercuts human centrality and sole agency. Crafting an artwork out of contemplation of that which cannot be directly observed opens a space of reflection in which a paradoxical truth can be held in awareness; that the external reality we observe is other than us but also inseparable from us.

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While much has been written about the conflicts, supposed or actual, between logic and faith, science and religion, few accounts of the personal turmoil these conflicts can cause exist. Likewise, many of these nonfiction accounts are written from a distinctly polarized place leaning either to science or faith. In this thesis, I mix research and history with memoir and a sense of poetry to explore my personal experience with this conflict. At its outset, I hoped for this project to capture my struggle as an orthodox member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in dealing with the questions my own sense of logic provided that institution. This goal was achieved in part. However, by the end of the project I had also captured a narrative exploration of my experience leaving the LDS Church and learning, instead of trusting the authority provided by a structure of orthodoxy, to feel comfortable trusting my own sense of reason. The first chapter captures my initial struggle with acknowledging questions within a religious structure. This is accomplished, in part, by merging the personal narrative with a researched account of French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I show both his struggle with questions and faith, and my desire to lean on his example as someone who acknowledged question without leaving his faith--in Chardin's case the Catholic Church. The second chapter, again following this pattern of mixing research with memoir, explores the feelings of exile I had during the time while I was still an orthodox member of the LDS church. This personal narrative is woven into several historical and literary accounts of exile. In the third chapter, I struggle with the question of what to do with the spiritual experiences I had during my time in the LDS Church after having separated myself from that institution. The short fourth chapter takes a strictly narrative line as I address my spiritual and mental outlook upon the completion of this project.

This collection of personal essays explores the use of symmetry as a metaphor of normality in contemporary American culture. These essays use formalistic exploration to enter into a conversation with the reader regarding the body, sexuality, gender, and mental illness. Each piece aims to dismantle and explode the metaphorical significations of symmetry through the use of interdisciplinary research combined with memoir.

Auto Fem: Essays is a nonfiction essay collection revolving around one young woman’s family and their relationship to the motors that accelerate familial bonds. Each motor-related essay brings readers deeper into the admiration of speed and the environment that surrounds it. The essays span from the author's childhood into adulthood, revealing the different ways a woman is sexualized within these subcultures. This sexualization leads to internal battles for the female participant that result in sometimes toxic eating habits and a complicated body image. The author provides a sometimes brutal, sometimes funny, but always honest view. The essays collected here explore one woman's experience of being a woman within male-dominated spaces-- from table gambling in casinos to Harley Davidson motorcycle rallies. These essays explore over twenty years of one nuclear family's love for motors and each other.

When Tori Bush’s father died of chemical causes related to Agent Orange, she found herself obsessed with tracing dioxins, one of the main ingredient of Agent Orange in other American communities. She began to visit and interview residents of Mossville, Louisiana, a small town on the border of Texas, which has fourteen petrochemical facilities surrounding the town. The residents also had been exposed to dioxins. Grief and anger connected Tori to this story, but it is far larger—is the right to a healthy natural environment a part of our American citizenship?

The essay is an exploration of a thought, an idea, an experience. To essay is simply to attempt. A conclusion is not always reached, a solution is not always found, but the writer is compelled to attempt to contain the thought, the idea, the experience, in words on the page. The performance essay makes the same attempt. But where the written essay is complete on the page, the performance essay is subject to constant transformation by the necessity of the physical body to the finished work. Not the body of the writer, but the body of the performer who stretches and bends the writer-shaped space of the essay to make it fit, completing the work in the creation of this new shape. This is the excitement for the writer of the performance essay. To surrender control of the work to another artist and see what they will make of it.

This project presents the results of a case study of creative nonfiction (CNF) pedagogical practices in undergraduate composition studies and creative writing courses at The University of Arizona, exploring how those who teach CNF at this top-ranked school for the study of the genre are shaping knowledge about it. This project analyzes within a rhetorical framework the various subject positions CNF teachers assume in relation to their writing and teaching as well as the teaching methodologies they utilize. I do this to articulate a theory of CNF pedagogy for the twenty-first century, one that represents the merging of individualist and public intellectual ideologies that I have observed in teacher interviews, course documents, and pedagogical publications about the genre. For students new to the genre, so much depends on how CNF is first introduced through class discussion, representative assigned prose models, and invention activities when it comes to creating knowledge about exactly what contemporary CNF is/can be and how writers might best generate prose that fits the genre's wide-ranging conventions in form, content, and rhetorical situation. Understanding how and why instructors promote certain ideologies in relation to CNF becomes increasingly important as this mode of personally situated, fact-based, narrative-privileging, literarily stylized discourse continues to gain popularity within and beyond the academy.

This exegesis examines how a writer can effectively negotiate the relationship between author, character, fact and truth, in a work of Creative Nonfiction. It was found that individual truths, in a work of Creative Nonfiction, are not necessarily universal truths due to individual, cultural, historical and religious circumstances. What was also identified, through the examination of published Creative Nonfiction, is a necessity to ensure there are clear demarcation lines between authorial truth and fiction. The Creative Nonfiction works examined, which established this framework for the reader, ensured an ethical relationship between author and audience. These strategies and frameworks were then applied to my own Creative Nonfiction.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study attempts to explore aspects of the textual representation of Magadien Wentzel, the main character of The Number, a work of literary journalism by Jonny Steinberg. It sets out to respond to the following two central research questions: Firstly, what narrative decisions does Jonny Steinberg make in the text of The Number to convey aspects of the reality he experienced in relation to his main character, Magadien Wentzel; and secondly, what effect do these decisions have on the reader? As literary journalism is a genre with fluid boundaries and therefore various definitions, the thesis first presents the challenge of definition and lays out a broad history of the genre in its attempt to situate The Number as a work of social documentary and of literary journalism in South Africa. Taking realism as its theoretical point of departure, this study aligns itself with the view that there exists an independent, extra-textual real-world and that knowledge of this real-world can be produced and shared. In doing so, realism presents itself as a literary form associated with art that cannot turn away from harsh aspects of human existence – a characteristic mirrored by Steinberg’s (and thus his character’s) major themes. By means of a textual analysis which seeks to interpret aspects of Steinberg’s narrative decisions in his text, this study uses tools of literary realism, namely the empirical effect and the character effect, in its exploration. This research, conducted within the qualitative research paradigm, is informed in particular by the assumption that there exists an implicit communicative contract between author and reader which leads to narrative trust, seen as an indispensable quality to the non-fictional reading experience. In the case of Steinberg and The Number, this study finds that the writer’s representation of a particular reality relies to an important degree on the level of trust he is able to inspire in a reader. This is pertinent because, being factual, non-fiction demands that a reader not only imagine a world other than their own, but that they believe it too. One of the ways in which Steinberg enables a reader to trust his representation of his particular reality is by overtly placing his literary and authorial concerns alongside his reportage of Magadien Wentzel, the main character of The Number. This distinctive narrative approach results in a modification of the reader’s traditional contract with the writer, forged by the text between them, to one in which the text unites the reader with both Steinberg as narrator and Magadien Wentzel as character. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie poog om aspekte van die tekstuele voorstelling van Magadien Wentzel, die hoofkarakter in The Number, 'n werk van literêre joernalistiek deur Jonny Steinberg, te verken. Dit probeer om die volgende twee sentrale navorsingsvrae te beantwoord: Eerstens, watter narratiewe besluite neem Jonny Steinberg in die teks van The Number om aspekte van die werklikheid wat hy ervaar het met betrekking tot sy hoofkarakter, Magadien Wentzel, oor te dra, en tweedens, watter effek het dit op die leser? Aangesien literêre joernalistiek 'n genre is met vloeibare grense en daarom verskeie definisies, probeer die tesis eerstens die uitdaging van definisie te beantwoord. Daarmee lê dit ook 'n breë basis van die geskiedenis van die genre in sy poging om The Number te situeer as 'n sosiale dokumentêr en as literêre joernalistiek in Suid-Afrika. Met realisme as teoretiese vertrekpunt, vereenselwig hierdie studie hom daarmee dat 'n onafhanklike, ekstra-tekstuele regte wêreld bestaan, en dat kennis van dié “regte wêreld” geskep en gedeel kan word. So representeer realisme hom as 'n literêre vorm wat verband hou met die kunste, en wat sigself nie kan afwend van die harde aspekte van die menslike bestaan nie – 'n kenmerk wat deur Steinberg se hooftemas – en daarom ook dié van sy hoofkarakter – weerspieël word. Deur middel van 'n tekstuele analise wat poog om aspekte van Steinberg se narratiewe besluite in sy teks te interpreteer, gebruik hierdie studie aspekte van literêre realisme, naamlik die empiriese effek en die karakter-effek, in sy ondersoek. Hierdie navorsing, wat binne die kwalitatiewe navorsingsparadigma uitgevoer is, is veral geïnformeer deur die aanname dat daar 'n implisiete kommunikatiewe kontrak tussen die skrywer en die leser bestaan wat lei tot narratiewe vertroue, gesien as 'n onmisbare element van die nie-fiksie-leeservaring. In die geval van Steinberg en The Number het hierdie studie bevind dat die skrywer se voorstelling van 'n bepaalde werklikheid tot 'n belangrike mate berus op die vlak van vertroue wat hy by die leser genereer. Dit is belangrik, want synde feitelik, vereis nie-fiksie dat 'n leser nie net 'n wêreld anders as hul eie voorstel nie, maar dat hulle ook daarin kan glo. Een van die maniere waarop Steinberg 'n leser in staat stel om sy voorstelling van sy besondere werklikheid te vertrou, is deur die plasing van sy literêre en outeursbesorgdheid direk langs sy reportage van Magadien Wentzel, die hoofkarakter in The Number. Hierdie unieke narratiewe aanslag het ’n modifikasie van die leser se tradisionele kontrak met die skrywer tot gevolg, ’n kontrak wat gewoonlik deur die teks tussen hulle gesmee is, en wat verander in een waarin die teks die leser met beide Steinberg as verteller en Magadien Wentzel as karakter verenig het.