AAWP 2016: Authorised Theft

Ffion Murphy: Economies of writing and desire: Henry James’ and the exegetical act 
As rhetorical constructs and complicit narratives, exegeses reward analysis by students and teachers of writing interested in philosophies of composition and the ways writers construe their literary, social and economic contexts and seek strategically to intervene in their work’s reception and interpretation. Drawing on theories of the paratext (Genette) and the frame (Pearson) as well as various notions of ‘value’, this paper investigates some uses and effects of literary exegesis, taking as its main study Henry James’s preface for The Spoils of Poynton, which was published in the New York Edition of his revised and collected novels and tales in 1908. Paratexts can be as intriguing, conflicted, contradictory, aspirational, figurative and libidinous as the creative work they reference, while they can also reveal and invite us to question the various economies that engender them. I explore James’s insistent metaphors of labour, commerce, waste, and (pro)creation, his anxieties about the (excessive) female voice in life and publishing, his desire for literary preservation and ‘appreciation,’ his conjuring of the ‘sublime economy of art’ and his strange doubling as ‘master-builder’ and ‘modern alchemist’. James envisaged that providing the ‘accessory facts in a given artistic case’ was a means of adding ‘contributive value’ to his previously published works, and universities, by their desire for paratextual accompaniments for creative writing submissions, likewise buy into an exegetical economy that has ‘value adding’ at its core. 

Julienne van Loon:  What do researchers do? The practice of knowledge-making through play 

This paper explores play as a practice, as a disposition, and as a crucial element in the production of research and new knowledge. Informed by a multidisciplinary literature review on play (from psychoanalysis to animal studies, ludology and anthropology), the paper showcases the results of an ongoing qualitative research project on the relationship between play and research practice.
     Drawing on material collected from interviews with twelve leading Australian researchers, the paper highlights possible links between research and creative production success and lifelong practices that enable and prioritise play and playfulness. A key focus is surety versus contingency, or rules versus the absence of rules, and the way in which these two forces or frameworks shift and interact during the process of research. How do new knowledge and innovation play off uncertainty? What is the role of the accident, the dead end, and the serendipitous in the creation of new work?
      My research is based on the premise that play is as crucial to the production of innovative research in traditional academic fields as it is to the production of new work in the creative arts. It emphasizes similarities in regards to research practice across the Australian Research Council’s five key discipline areas, and signals opportunities for further research in this area.
      This paper extends on early work on this topic presented at the Australasian Association of Writing Program Conference in 2015. It speaks to the one of the conference’s central themes for 2016: the question how we make. The broader intention is to raise the status of play as a means for fostering innovation, experimentation and new knowledge, and to argue for research policy frameworks that actively foster contingency, possibility and the unforeseen. 

Lynn Jenner: Opportunity, Fixed Points and the Space In-between: The Creative Writing PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters 

This small-scale qualitative study examines relationships between the critical and creative components in The International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) PhD as understood by six participants (graduates, supervisors and examiners) in the IIML community of practice. Consideration of the options available for the critical component leads to consideration of flexible space and fixed points within the degree structure and examination criteria. Flexibility in wording of the degree requirements allows or perhaps encourages experimentation by students in terms of the critical component of the degree. This paper focuses on practical strategies to help students navigate this space. Participants outline strategies they find useful for creative writing PhD students including ‘performing what you do’, the use of an annotated bibliography and giving primacy in the critical component to the craft issues identified as significant for the creative component. Participants describe ways to frame the thesis effectively for examiners.  ‘Writerly critical work’ is discussed as an alternative to expository academic prose, along with the academic risks of including non-traditional critical writing in a PhD. The author links practices that support students to learn conscious orchestration of the flexibility and rigidity factors to the concept of learner agency. 

Jessica Seymour: 

Is there WiFi on this plane?

When future researchers look back on this generation seeking to understand our culture and society, the internet will be a rich source of archival study. We as a culture have begun to digitise not only our records and our history, but also ourselves. Contemporary internet users construct digital ‘bodies’ through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – performing their personalities in order to participate in the online culture – while Bots and Cookies track our use of the online space in order to predict which advertisements would be most effective. It is through this combination of deliberate construction and the (somewhat neutral) reflections of man-made, coded interpreters that our online ‘selves’ form.
      The purpose of this creative work is to explore identity-constructing practices in the online space, to reflect on the ways that the online archive can be read, and to develop an experimental non-fiction work using the internet as a base medium. The work takes the form of a travel memoir, told through a combination of my social media outputs and internet history between November 18, 2015, and March 1, 2016. I have selectively compiled posts and archived pages in order to produce what I consider to be an authentic representation of my experience, constructing a narrative of myself through the glimpses and ambiguous realities of the online world.