voi Cesexample that has been used in a number of discussions about practice- led research in
creative writing: if a playwright is writing a play about the suffragettes, he or she might
be reading about the suffragettes, but that is an act of accessing already the existing
knowledge that he or she needs to know in order to create the work. any original
contribution to knowledge will be embedded in how this information is presented to
the audience in the form of the play.
This mode of practice is not research, but a gathering of the already existing ‘blue
bits’, to use Brady’s term, in order to make a new nest. The problem arises when the
bowerbird researcher claims to have contributed new knowledge in an area that is
already mined and known. Kate grenville’s experience in the making of her novel
The Secret River is an example of precisely this problem. she claims, as we note above,
to have completed a research process and contributed knowledge about australia’s
history, but she is not an historian, and historians closed ranks against her and her
work, criticizing her method and any claims for authenticity she has made in relation
to the work. gay lynch, indeed, refers to grenville’s narrative as an ‘apocryphal story’
(lynch 2009), though one that makes a contribution to the discipline of writing, if not
to history. similarly, it is possible to read zbigniew herbert’s poem ‘pebble’ (herbert
2007: 197) as the outcome of research. This work explores ways of perceiving a stone,
and demonstrates the use of a research question, context and methods: the observation
of the natural world through a phenomenological encounter and observation. But the
knowledge presented in ‘pebble’ does not contribute to the field of geology – it presents
ways of looking, sensing and otherwise experiencing a stone that may illuminate the
work of a geologist, but tells us nothing, really, about geology. it does, however, force
both poet and reader to reconsider not only the properties of stone, but also human
encounters with stones and, by extension, the natural world.
our point, then, is that practice- led research in creative writing affords researchers
the opportunity to build knowledge in their field. While they may cross disciplinary
borders in the process of gathering information for their work, their knowledge
generation is typically confined to the domain of creative practice – to narrative,
to poetics ... to the field in which they operate. in any discussion of the knowledge
content of a work of literary production, it is important that the writer interrogate not
only the work, but also the methods and epistemological frameworks used to produce
that work, in order to determine what contribution it makes, and to which stocks
of knowledge. in short, it is important that writer- researchers identify precisely what
aspects of their work constitute original contributions to knowledge within the field,
or in another field, and limit their claims to what can be substantiated by process and
content.
in a period of significant and rapid change in higher education internationally,
academic staff working in the creative arts in universities have transformed a series
of individual art forms into a range of coherent academic disciplines, and developed
those disciplines into viable components of the academy. in this process, it has been
possible to demonstrate that creative writers, by creatively embracing and working
with the dialectic of the ancient quarrel, have been able to craft a functional response
to plato, and to substantiate the extent to which poetry and philosophy can co- exist
and co- produce knowledge and experiences. This practice, and the work produced,
are important not just for writers, but for the social context more generally. a decade