Looking for trouble : problem-finding processes in literary creativity

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Copyright: Wood, Charlotte
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Abstract
This thesis comprises a creative component, the novel The Natural Way of Things, and an accompanying dissertation, a longitudinal study, Looking for Trouble: Problem finding processes in literary creativity. The novel, a story of young women imprisoned in the Australian outback as punishment for perceived sexual misconduct, is an allegory of contemporary misogyny and corporate control. Written in a semi-fabulist mode, the fiction explores conflicting notions of 'natural' womanhood, ideas of persecution and scapegoating, and the ramifications of a suspended identity when contemporary technology and communications are forbidden. The novel explores and enlarges upon contemporary Western archetypes of 'fallen' women, and the ways in which a Kafkaesque bureaucracy might brutalise both the jailer and the jailed. Writing a work of literature involves different 'creative' processes, some quite deliberate and conscious, but many propelled by instinctive hunches. Despite the plethora of cognitive research into creativity, the processes by which these creative decisions take place have rarely been studied among professional creative writers at work in the real world. The dissertation's study of cognitive processes in literary creativity uses dual process theories of cognition as a conceptual framework to examine how works of literature- including the novel above- are created. This longitudinal participant observation study of four contemporary professional writers questions whether existing cognitive process models of creative decision-making accord with the way writers in real-world scenarios create their books. The study identifies nine specific cognitive processes which fall into two overlapping layers of creative thought. While the results broadly accord with dual process theories of creativity, they also challenge the stepped, cyclical nature of existing multi-staged cognitive process models. Based on data from the study a dual-layered, high-opacity model of literary creativity is proposed to account for the random simultaneity of the nine identified processes. As the novel was in creation throughout the data collection period, the cognitive processes of writing The Natural Way of Things are thus identified. The relationship between the critical and creative work of this thesis, therefore, is embedded in the study and the resulting model of creativity.
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Author(s)
Wood, Charlotte
Supervisor(s)
Brewster, Anne
Fabian, Dorottya
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Publication Year
2015
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
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