Kings, clowns and trumps: Creative-exegetical irony in the creative writing HDR thesis

Abstract

Bahktin argues that the novel subsumes elements of the medieval carnival, including the rehearsal and collapse of competing social discourses to generate new meaning. Williams’ performative exegesis (2016) and Krauth and Nash’s creative-exegetical (2019) are academic forms of the creativecritical genre that simultaneously perform exegetical and creative work. Historically within the academy, academic texts like exegeses are perceived as not only distinct from creative writing, but also better for creating and communicating research findings. However, by applying Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnivalised novel, performative exegeses and creative-exegetical texts can be seen to generate hybrid, ironic utterances that collapse this epistemological hierarchy and undermine the perceived distinctions between creative and academic exegetical writing. These utterances can be categorised into three kinds of creative-exegetical irony: king-clown utterances, where creative text does academic exegetical work; clown-king utterances, where “academic” exegetical text does creative work; and trump utterances, which are indistinguishably both creative and academic. Such utterances are a defining feature of the creativecritical genre’s capacity for innovation in form and meaning, particularly within creative writing higher degree by research (HDR) theses.