My practice-led research in Creative Writing consists of composing a novel closely focalised through three members of a dual-heritage family in Suffolk in 2004 after the teenage daughter is diagnosed with leukaemia. ‘Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics’ explores the question: what are the tensions between truth, kindness and the form and poetics of the novel? My critical reflection considers techniques used to convince the reader, and my attempts to represent unconscious psychic processes of the novel’s protagonists in relation to trauma fiction. The aim of the research programme has been to discover the appropriate form for a novel in which characters are paramount. My research methodology has consisted of revising repeated drafts in order to imagine and articulate the points of view of the novel’s protagonists: Rosie, a mixed-race teenager who has a vivid sense of the ridiculous, who wants to separate herself from her family and mix with her friends; Jay, her White mother, who works in anti-racist education and has ambitions as a photographer, together with a tendency to embrace New Age ideas; and Mel, Rosie’s stepfather, who runs an independent cinema, who never intended to be anyone’s father but finds himself caught up in loving Rosie. The novel is about the language and voices used, and about how the relationships between the characters change as a result of Rosie’s illness and impending death. Writing a commentary has informed the discipline of editing and revision. My completed critical reflection recounts decisions made on ethical or aesthetic grounds, while attempting to relate the research to cultural preoccupations in the study and composition of novels. The originality of this contribution to knowledge consists of fiction that focalises three original characters. A claim to originality may also be made in relation to my work on metaphor, metonymy and the unconscious.

This thesis explores the scope artists’ writing has to perform the ‘sensation of knowledge’ – a term I am using to indicate my central proposition that knowledge can be felt. Through descriptions of place, the use of allusion and first person narration the thesis paves the way for a series of encounters between the reader and the matter, content and commonplace bodily processes of contemporary lived experience. By being grounded in this way, the ‘sensation of knowledge’ challenges presuppositions about the immateriality of knowledge; it makes readers alert to their own idiosyncratic perceptions of its meanings. Further, the thesis asks them to consider how such experience gains the authority and status of knowledge when the significance is felt rather than comprehended. The writing has come out of research into meaning-making that is located in the experience of specific sites and situations and has taken place across moving image, installation, writing and performance. The thesis is presented as a self-contained art object with the writing that comprises it performing its argument through its form and methods rather than by explaining, cataloguing or defining it. The writing as art practice contributes to a broad art discourse but also, critically, to academia. It specifically makes its proposition within, and in response to the current culture and format of knowledge production within the academy. It meets the defining expectation of a PhD to produce new knowledge and provides the means for this knowledge to be accessible through existing academic and institutional conventions. Its knowledge is contingent on the sensation of its encounter, an approach that is counter to that which the academy expects. With these propositions in mind, the writing produced for this thesis situates ideas and language alongside descriptions of physical substances. It questions assumptions about the default function of language to expedite the delivery of information, by slowing down the feelings experienced. The material and abstract references accumulate to reveal the sense of weight that occurs in response to the act of reading. Formal conventions of academic writing and reading, such as footnotes, are used as meta-critical devices that illuminate the apparatus of institutionalised knowledge production. The thesis places such devices alongside forms of storytelling including historiographic fiction and autobiographical narratives to reveals the multiplicity of modes through which knowledge can be produced and absorbed. This multiplicity is a critical device that challenges institutionalized conventions through which knowledge is legitimized. Through these methods the thesis locates the production of knowledge between the body, ideas and the lived world and, as such, challenges the superiority of one form over another.

My Creative Writing thesis comprises a collection of uncanny short stories that explores social, psychological and physical impacts of advances in science and technology, and a critical-reflective exegesis. Using a research methodology that critically examines insights emerging from creative and reflective practice, the thesis as a whole addresses the question of how the short story can be used as a particularly appropriate mode to illuminate contemporary experiences of science and technology through the creation of uncanny affect. The exegesis offers a definition of contemporary uncanny fiction; the stories test a range of thematic, stylistic and formal strategies for achieving uncanny affect. The resulting creative work suggests a contemporary technological uncanny is one that develops and extends Freud’s conceptualisation of das Unheimliche. Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical background to my practice research, providing a historical overview of the uncanny as a phenomenon and literary mode. Chapter 2 draws on Gothic and posthuman studies and psychoanalysis, and short stories by China Miéville, Nicholas Royle and Ali Smith, to explore the implications of insights emerging from my short stories: notions of an ‘uncanny of the virtual gaze’ and the body as site of impact for science and technology characterise a technological uncanny particular to our age, and comprise an original contribution to dialogues and debates theorizing a contemporary uncanny. Chapter 3 applies these notions to the practice of creative writing, to investigate the impact of its location in the academy. Finally, Chapter 4 extends existing narratological theory to suggest how second person is a particularly uncanny narrative mode, and examines issues of form, voice, structure and sequence to contend that short fiction is an especially effective form for the creation of uncanny affect – at the level of the individual story, and the collection as a whole.

This thesis comprises an original work of Weird fiction, entitled The Adventures of Kunstlicht in the Netherworld, and a commentary which explores its relationship to the fiction and writing practices of the American Weird fantasy author, H. P. Lovecraft. The novel is the first person narrative account of Christian Blackwood’s experiences with his goth band, Kunstlicht, their pursuit by politically motivated occultists, and encounters with serial killers, avant-garde artists, revenant Nazis and supernatural folkloric monsters. The majority of the story unfolds retrospectively in conversations with the former police officer Wade. The final section shows the band’s own attempt to perform practical magic and their meeting with a resurrected pagan god. The commentary opens with an introductory examination of the extent of Lovecraft’s influence on fantasy (and especially horror) fiction since his death, the general rationale for using him as model, and the specific thematic issues relevant to this novel. There follow three chapters. The first chapter discusses the realist tendencies in Lovecraft’s work, his world-building strategies and those in recent Weird fiction. It then shows how Lovecraft’s prescriptions were applied in this novel, and how this affected the novel’s narrative and tone. The second chapter examines the connection between his work – and that of his predecessors – and the cultural, scientific and occult thought of his time, showing how these elements were combined to give depth to his corpus. I then explain how this approach was applied and updated in my own novel. In the third chapter I explore Lovecraft’s extensive synthetic mythology, its relationship to existing folklore and myth, and to a folkloric interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I then explain how I combined occult and Nietzschean elements with the Lovecraftian to produce a more complex Weird novel. In the concluding section, I briefly examine how the novel fits with other recent Lovecraft-inspired work, and assess to what extent it succeeds as Weird fiction.

Academic writing can be difficult to accomplish and disengaging to read (Monchamp 2007), the result is that often when we carry out research, our final readership can be miniscule. While reading and writing for the purposes of research should be informative, insightful, rigorous and challenging, is it also possible to make these processes entertaining or even pleasurable? Can the researcher give some personal insight into their world view and also from that of their interviewees instead of pretending that they play an entirely passive and objective role in the research process? Many qualitative researchers (Grumet 1981; Cortazzi 1993; Charmaz 1995; Ely, Vinz et al. 1997; Erben 1998; Usher 1998; Denzin and Lincoln 1998, 2003; Ellis and Bochner 1998, 2003; Richardson 1998, 2003; Bruner 2004; Perselli 2004; Antoniou and Moriarty 2006; Short, Grant et al. 2007; Sparkes 2007; Caulley 2008; Trahar 2008) have started to push the academic writing borders and explore new ways to write up research. This assignment seeks to provide a rationale for using narrative as a research method to tell the story of my research and to trial these methods on a small-scale project. A professor with an extensive writing portfolio has been interviewed in order to access some of her experiences with academic writing. The author seeks to use a emotionalist approach to the interview process by obtaining the participant’s view on their authentic experiences through open ended and unstructured interviews (Silverman 1993) with the aim of encouraging the interviewee to share their thoughts while discussing the author’s own observations and attitudes towards academic writing. This is in order to provide ideas and insight that might help other academics with their own approaches to the writing process.

“I opened my mouth to say both Yes and No. A fly had time to go in and out of it.”1 One way of imagining the concerns of this thesis would draw reference to the preposition. Prepositions are words that denote relative positions. Gertrude Stein favoured them over all other types of word. This writing, itself positioned in a wider body of work, employs and reflects on gestures of appropriation and positioning familiar from the practice of collage, and common to curation, writing and magic as well as art-making practices. In, for example, magical practices such as Temurah and Notarikon in the Kabbalah, or the narrative Pathworking rituals of contemporary Witchcraft, items of text and/or imagery are appropriated and reiterated in varying combination. This PhD project mimics these practices, here appropriating its constituent materials to the space of writing (and thereby to what magicians term the Astral Plane), there to move them around in order to become sensitive to their communications. This results in the ravelling of a complex and somewhat nebulous body. What the nature of this body – that is, the body of the artwork – might be, becomes the fugal question around which this writing attempts to orient itself.2 Confusion and intoxication inevitably result, and their Brownian dynamic is found more representative of the encounter with artworks that this writing seeks to address than linear approaches seeking resolution, conclusion or definition. Constructions of division are necessarily tested throughout this undertaking. As an element of a ‘two-part submission’, this writing acknowledges the necessity to operate across an arbitrarily imposed writing/practice fissure, and finds it urgent to address the encounter with artworks not as an external commentary but as a work among, within, around, by, against, through and with works.

This research aims to develop understanding of how teachers’ experience of practising creative writing influences pedagogy in schools. The research is located within a literary studies domain, responding to the context in which creative writing is most commonly taught in schools and in higher education. The central research question explored is: • How is the pedagogy of creative writing in schools influenced by teachers’ creative writing practice? The research explores the premise that creative writing practice has the potential to raise teachers’ ‘confidence as writers’, enabling them to ‘provide better models for pupils’ (Ofsted, 2009: p.6). This thesis examines what ‘creative writing practice’ means in the context of developing pedagogy; considers how creative writing is conceptualised by teachers; and investigates how teachers’ creative writing practice connects to pedagogic methods and approaches. The research sub questions that underpin the research are: • How has creative writing been conceptualised in educational policy, and how do these conceptions influence pedagogy in schools? • Does the practice of creative writing influence teachers’ conceptualisations of creative writing, and, if so, what is the impact on pedagogy? • Does the practice of creative writing influence teachers’ perceptions of themselves as writers, and, if so, what is the impact on pedagogy? • Does the experience of working with writers influence teachers’ pedagogic approaches in the classroom, and if so, how? The research includes a case study involving 14 primary and secondary school teachers, engaged in developing their own creative writing practice under the guidance of professional writers. The case study approach enables exploration of the research questions through analysis of participants’ lived experience of creative writing practice and pedagogy. The analysis of the case study at the heart of this research is situated within an interpretive framework, acknowledging the complexity of multiple meanings at play in socio-cultural learning contexts. The analysis draws on Bruner’s exploration of how pedagogical approaches imply conceptions of the learner’s mind and pedagogy (Bruner, 1996), and considers the interplay between teachers’ experiences of creative writing, and their choice of pedagogical methods and approaches.

This doctoral portfolio is a collection of papers and pieces of creative writing arising out of therapeutic, supervisory and training conversations and in relation to a wide range of texts. I have wanted to find ways of writing ethically so as to avoid objectifying people and appropriating their words, their life stories. I find ways of writing in which the values and practices of a collaborative, dialogical and reflexive ways of being with people are echoed in the texts. I show how writing and reading are relational practices in that I speak with the participants in the texts as well as with the reader and also with other writers. To do this, I experiment with a variety of written forms and employ literary devices so as to speak from within a range of practice relationships, from within inner dialogue, with real and fictitious characters. Technically and ethically, I try to write in a way which not only captures the sound of talk but which also speaks with the reader who would be reading, and perhaps hearing these accounts of conversation. By sharing a rich level of detail from my polyvocal inner dialogue, I invite the reader into a unique and privileged alongside position as a participant-observer in my work. Inspirational research methodologies include: writing as a method of inquiry, reflexivity, autoethnography, performance ethnography and transgression interpreted by many areas of systemic theory and practice. To support this innovative work, I offer several theoretical and practical papers offering novel developments on systemic practice theory. I situate systemic practice as a research method and demonstrate many family resemblances between systemic inquiry and qualitative inquiry. I offer a reflexive model for systemic practice and practice research which I call Praction Research which regards therapy and research as political acts requiring an activist agenda. Linked to this I politicise ideas of reflexivity by introducing local and global reflexivity and create a political connection with a concept of theorethical choices in theory and ethics in practice research. I propose a new form of ethnography suited to systemic practice, Relational Ethnography in which I draw attention to reflexive relationships between writer and readers, between the voices of inner and outer dialogue in research texts.

Creative Writing as a teachable artistic practice, and reinforcing its identity with an appropriate pedagogical approach, has been a vibrant research area for some years now. Yet, despite a strong increase in writing courses all over the globe, there has been little research into how creative practitioners can actually contribute to facilitate the process of skill development in higher education learners, especially in the public sector universities across Sindh, Pakistan. In an effort to introduce Creative Writing as an academic discipline to government universities in Sindh, the present research sought to observe the impact of a training programme on English fiction on a sample of native learners. A total of thirteen students volunteered for this project. The research sample was selected from a population of second year undergraduates, enrolled in literature courses at the Institute of English Language and Literature (IELL) in the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan (USJP); wherein Creative Writing had hitherto been a non-existent area of studies. Students were offered a twenty-nine session modular-workshop, aimed at exploring and expediting their artistic abilities in the short time span of a single semester. To ensure the trustworthiness of findings, the entire procedure was documented under the guidance of the researcher’s supervisory team. A post-workshop evaluation survey was also used for attaining student feedback. The setup of assessment items and analysis constructs of students’ narrative portfolios were adapted from validated sources and aligned with the context of this study. However, neither the feedback nor the assessment of students’ work was counted as the findings of this research. Unlike non-artistic inquiries, the post-training creative output gathered from project participants was interpreted as the final research outcome. Methodologically, this process was conducted following a matrix of three practice-oriented research paradigms; whereas “performative research” was selected as the principle data creation and presentation strategy. The resulting research insight has exhibited an in-depth understanding of approaches that could facilitate fiction composition abilities of learners from different language backgrounds, while writing in English. It also allows practitioners to consider non-typical methods of research to contribute holistically to the existing body of knowledge in the field.

A turn away from language and the human mind as the dominant (or only) determinants of reality can be identified within many disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literature, reflecting a growing acceptance of human and non-human, living and non-living entities as real, complex and partially withdrawn agents in the world. In Object Oriented Ontology the definition of object is extended to include humans, who have no special ontological status. Timothy Morton proposes rhetoric as a means of drawing closer to other objects, of contacting the ‘strange stranger’; objects cannot be known directly, or fully, but can be explored through imaginative speculation. Drawing on Object Oriented Ontology, my project explores making - an intimate engagement between body and material - as a means of thinking the body as a (strange) object within a mesh of strange objects. Facture is documented as image and language, prompting a series of shifting, speculative questions: • Can writing be brought to making to generate new new approaches to craft production? • How might writing in response to making, or objects, be reintroduced into a making process as a form of feedback? • Can writing_making methods generate new approaches to writing (about) making and materials? • How might a combination of production, documentation and reflection be displayed as artwork/research? • Can making be seen as a means for contacting the ‘strange stranger’?