NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

BODY OF RESEARCH, BODY OF WORK

  • SARAH GORY
GENERATIVE TENSION IN THE CREATIVE WRITING PHD — Scholars such as Professor Nigel Krauth (2011, 2018) argue that there is an inherent tension between the ‘radical experimentation’ required to innovate in the discipline of creative writing, and the standard exegetical models, orthodoxies and conventional positions of the PhD thesis. In response, this essay looks to the role of structure in the creative writing PhD thesis, asking how experimenting with standard exegetical models can be generative for practice and research.

Using my own creative/critical hybrid thesis as a paradigm, this essay suggests working within that tension by playing with and subverting conventional organising elements of form and structure – literature review, chapters, linear progression, so on. Here, I utilise Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature and Genette’s concept of paratextuality as methods that are inherently in relation to (and so in dialogue with) their disciplinary or cultural contexts, enabling a deterritorialisation of the site of the creative writing PhD towards new ways of thinking about (and moving through) the body of the thesis and its attendant modes of knowledge production. In this way, the paper proposes a roadmap for what Krauth and Nash call the blended ‘creative-exegetical genre’ (2019), one that is agile and relational rather than fixed in taxonomies or disciplines. In keeping with the contention that structure constitutes its own mode of knowing, this paper enacts its own experiments, fragmenting and devolving in its conclusion, just like the project it reflects on. 

Keywords Doctoral writing, experimental exegetical models, deterritorialising creative writing, creative practice research

DOI 10.65289/creativematters.2025.10.6

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Sarah Gory is a writer, editor and researcher. Her critical-creative writing has been published in journals and magazines, and as book chapters both in Australia and overseas. Sarah completed her PhD in 2025 and is a lecturer at RMIT University. 

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