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Abstract
The first part of the current thesis is a novel entitled The Eulogy, which examines the nature of love and choice in situations of intergenerational trauma, bereavement and disability. The narrator, Kathy, is at a crossroads in life and examines her family’s history through the last three generations against the backdrop of World War Two, the Malayan Conflict and the Vietnam War. The novel explores whether and under what circumstances people are able to make different choices from their forebears. In writing The Eulogy, I drew on lived experience, family stories, publicly available accounts of disability, war, and intergenerational trauma, and my own imagination. The Eulogy is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in the novel are either products of the author’s mind or are used fictitiously.
The research dissertation entitled From the heart: The gift experience of creative writing and reading forms the second part of the thesis. Whilst creative writing and reading arise as objects of inquiry in a number of fields of scholarship, there has been limited examination of the experience of reading or the experience of creative writing. In this dissertation, I ask the questions: How do readers and writers describe the experience of reading and writing in their own terms? And what can this add to our understanding of modes of human interaction and being?
The dissertation harnesses the conceptual power of phenomenology and interdisciplinary gift theories to deepen our understanding of creative writing and reading. I employ an empirical interpretive phenomenological methodology in this study, conducting and analysing twenty in-depth interviews with creative writers and readers who had experienced “loving” a book at some point in their lives. I look at the ways in which writers and readers describe how it feels to read a loved book, and how it feels to engage in writing fiction. The dissertation contributes to the development of a theory of creative writing and reading as gift-relations and, in a broader sense, to the development of a relational ontology of human being.