Boundary Street

The ontological questions posed by the creative writing thesis with an embedded, performative exegesis characterise it as postmodern literature. An embedded exegesis is presented within the fictional work it explains and a performative exegesis uses generic conventions from creative writing to not only communicate but perform research. When constructed inside a fictional frame, the exegetical author becomes a fictional performance oscillating between presence and absence and reality and unreality. The author of the creative writing doctoral thesis is especially spectral, divided between art and academia and emergence and establishment. The fictional frame problematising the author’s existence also problematises the validity of the academic research presented in the exegesis, especially when creative writing conventions and discourses steal into academic writing and vice versa. Performative exegeses present knowledge both in process and as product, revealing the tentative nature of all knowledge, including knowledge of reality. Creative writing theses with embedded, performative exegeses establish diegetic and ontological hierarchies to collapse them into rhizomes. They imply an infinite regress of texts and argumentation that implies our world is just one text among many. These ontological problems not only categorise creative writing theses with embedded, performative exegeses as postmodern fiction but may prompt those who engage with them to ontological crisis.