Creative Praxis as a Form of Academic Discourse

In most arts and communication courses, the students’ main vehicle for expression of their research findings is the critical essay, the dissertation or thesis. But in Creative Writing and other practice-based disciplines, the student’s main mode of expression is what Lincoln and Denzin call a ‘performance based’ creative artefact resulting from practice-led research. In this paper I will give examples of performance based research in four fictional pieces, ‘The Lives of Animals’ and Diary of a Bad Year, narratives in which J.M. Coetzee uses fictional devices in order to explore issues that are traditionally articulated by conventional forms of critical analysis; ‘Just a Story’, a student narrative assignment on meta-fiction which itself uses meta-fictional devices to make its point; and ‘The Absence of Theory’, a paper I wrote in the form of a short story, which explores theories of creativity that underpin creative writing workshops. In these stories, I aim to show how the creative language of the short story can be employed as an alternative form of academic discourse to the conventional essay