The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

voi Ces

an ongoing concern and point of debate among writers in the academy, and also among
the administrators and bureaucrats who determine what counts as research: in this
way, the ancient quarrel retains its power and its capacity to influence both discourse
and practice. a way through this may be offered by the cultural historian nicholas
zurbrugg (2004), who in what again seems to echo and then develop schlegel’s notion
of incomplete philosophy, suggests that in creative works we can see the presence of
what Roland Barthes called ‘prophetic technocreativity’ (Barthes 1977: 67). That is to
say, knowledge innovations emerge first in art works, and only subsequently emerge in
philosophy. paul magee suggests something similar, raising:

the possibility that a modern poem is not a knowledge- report, nor even a

mode of self- expression, so much as a device for generating creative desire –

the desire for meaning, for resolution, for further aesthetic experience, for an

infinite number of things – in others.

(magee 2009)

This seems to invoke plato and his conception of the link between divine madness,
desire and knowledge; it also limits the knowledge contribution of a single creative
work to a generative moment, one that does not offer knowledge in itself, but directs
attention to questions that need to be asked, and understandings that need to be
formulated.

Practice- led research and writing

a considerable body of work has been produced in the past decade or so to explore
these issues and tease out the relationship between poetry (art) and philosophy (re-
search). The so- called ‘strand Report’ (strand 1998) was a seminal australian publica-
tion on the presence and impact of creative practice within universities. since 1998,
serious consideration of creative practice as research has increasingly marked academic
publishing in the creative disciplines, and practice- led research has received an in-
creasing level of formal attention both within the academic institution and from the
publishing industry. This attention has been, in particular, in relation to the develop-
ment of discourses and practices in writing schools in the uK, australia, usa, europe
and more recently, south east asia. in this, the understanding of the discipline of
creative writing has moved from that of a practical craft that could be taught as such,
to a tertiary level discipline framed by theory and methodology as well as a developing
scholarly literature. This includes demonstrating that, as a discipline, creative writ-
ing is capable of combining conventional academic rigour with creative thought, or
producing research with utility as well as art (and artefacts) of aesthetic value. While
institutional, disciplinary and national policy and process contexts have had an impact
on both the practices of writing, and writing as research, in tertiary institutions, crea-
tive writing academics have, in turn, contributed to discussions about, and definitions
of, practice- led research.
While this also applies to other areas in the creative arts, there are specific
epistemological and methodological issues associated with practice- led research in
writing that do not apply, or not to the same extent, in the other creative fields. Because