Abstract
By extending the notion of ‘academic’ writing to include heuristic, figurative, reflexive, and ‘messy’ textualities, I hope to escape the restrictions associated with essay, article, and thesis writing. Few students, it seems, ever attempt to make their ‘academic’ pieces creative or evocative in the same way they do their poems or stories; in fact, they usually ‘play dead’ when it comes to formal writing. Such is the tyranny of the conventional essay on artistic thinking and creative practice. Creative writers, too, seldom venture beyond the formal elements of genre or genre itself. By extending the notion of ‘writing’ to include oxymoronic genres and pictorial, stylistic, and hypertextual elements, I hope to extend the possibilities of text production beyond those usually afforded to students; that is, beyond essays and prose on the one hand, and poems and stories on the other. Various textual theories and practices have helped me in this process: picto-ideo-phonographic writing, autoethnography, messy texts, narrative inquiry, and poststructuralism. Such practices disrupt the ‘formalities’ of the essay and the ‘orthodoxies’ of the book. As Derrida (1976: 87) suggests, ‘What is thought today cannot be written according to the line and the book…’ No, but it can inspire us to think differently about how we construct texts and how we write prose (including how we arrange texts on the page).
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