Suchergebnisse

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe, situate and justify the use of creative nonfiction as an overlooked but legitimate source of text for use in social inquiry, specifically within the ambit of narrative inquiry. What potential lies in using creative writing, creative nonfiction specifically, as a source of text in social research? How may it be subjected to modes of analysis such that it deepens understandings of substantive issues? Links are explored between creative nonfiction and the social context of such accounts in an attempt to trace how writers embed general social processes in their narrative.


Design/methodology/approach
Three exemplars from literary magazines are described in which whiteness is the substantive theme. The first author is a woman who writes about her relationship with her landscaper, the second story is written by a man who is overwhelmed by guilt after uttering a racial slur, and the third text is by a man who describes his attempts to help a homeless couple. The authors' interpersonal experiences with people unlike themselves tell something significant about the relationship between selfhood and power relations.


Findings
No singular pattern emerges when analyzing these three narratives through the critical lens of whiteness. This is because whiteness is not a subject position or static identity but a practice, something that it is done in relation to others. It is a collective capacity whose value is realized only in dynamic relationship with others. As a rich source of narratives, creative nonfiction may generate insights about whiteness and middle classness and how their intersections give rise to complex and contradictory sets of social relations.


Originality/value
There is very little precedence for using creative nonfiction as text for analysis in any discipline in the social sciences despite its accessibility, its richness and its absence of risk. Inviting the sociological imagination in its project to link the personal to the political, it opens possibilities for the analysis of both in relationship to each other. As a common form of narrating everyday understandings, creative nonfiction offers something unique and under-valued to the social researcher. For these reasons, the paper is highly original.

Chapter 1 -- The Grain of Sounds; Chapter 2 -- Language and the Word of My Father; Chapter 3 -- The Two Mothers; Chapter 4 -- Brother's Keeper; Chapter 5 -- Honeymoon with Mom; Chapter 6 -- Schooling; Chapter 7 -- Adolescence; Chapter 8 -- College and Other Awakenings; Epilogue

In this thesis, I argue that few attempts were as effective in correcting the exceptionalist ethos of the United States than the creative nonfiction written by the veterans and journalists of the Vietnam War. Using critical works on creative nonfiction, I identify the characteristics of the genre that allowed Paul John Eakin to call it 'a special kind of fiction.' I summarise a brief history of creative nonfiction to demonstrate how it became a distinctly American form despite its Old World origins. I then claim that it was the genre most suited to the kind of ideological transformation that many hoped to instigate in U.S. society in the aftermath of Vietnam. Following this, the study explores how this "new" myth-making process occurred. I use Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War to illustrate how autobiography/memoir was able to demonstrate the detrimental effect that America's exceptionalist ideology was having on its population. Utilising narrative and autobiographical theory, I contend that these accounts represented a collective voice which spoke for all Americans in the years after Vietnam. Using Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie and C.D.B. Bryan's Friendly Fire, I illustrate how literary journalism highlighted the hubris of the American government. I contend that while poiesis is an integral attribute of creative nonfiction, by the inclusion of extraneous bibliographic material, authors of the genre could also be seen as creating a literary context predisposing the reader towards an empirical interpretation of the events documented within. Finally, I claim that oral histories were in their essence a synthesis of "everyman" experiences very much in keeping with the American zeitgeist of the early Eighties. Focussing solely on Al Santoli's Everything We Had, I demonstrate how such polyphonic narratives personalised the history of the Vietnam War.

The paper aims at identifying, explaining and illustrating the affordances of "creative nonfiction" as a style of writing social science. The first part introduces creative nonfiction as a method of writing which brings together empirical material and fiction. In the second part, based on illustrations from my ethnographic research of European "crisis reporters," written in the form of a novel about a fictional journalist, but also based on a review of existing social science research that employs a creative method of writing, I identify several main affordances of creative nonfiction in social-scientific research. In particular, I argue that creative nonfiction allows scientists to illustrate their findings, to express them in an allegorical way, to organize data into a narrative, to let their pieces of research act in the social world, and to permeate research accounts with self-reflexive moments. I also discuss some apparent negative affordances: challenges that creative nonfiction poses to readers and to the institutionalized academic discourse. Finally, I suggest that writing about sociological problems in the style of creative nonfiction can help to produce more engaging and engaged texts, and I discuss the ethical implications of the approach.

In this manuscript, we take up the invitation by the editors of this special issue to contribute to answering the question: "What does it mean to write qualitatively?" Drawing on speculative realism, we describe writing qualitatively as a relational process of becoming through writing and reading creative nonfiction. We reflect on our experiences as researchers, subjects, collaborators, writers, and readers through lens of relational power. By collaborating to craft an immersive true story that revealed larger truths to readers, we were affected by each other, created ourselves out of what we had taken in, and influenced each other and others after being affected by them in our processes of relational becoming.

Digital storytelling techniques and persuasive communications are becoming increasingly intertwined and realized in cultural discourses such as cultural heritage, environmental activism, and politics. Rhetorical theory has grounded and influenced communication practice since the age of oration, and as society is increasingly undergoing new mediatization, digital rhetorical theory can be reexamined and applied to nonfiction digital narratives for improved practice. Narratology provides key theoretical foundations that are braided into digital rhetoric for application to digital nonfiction narratives. This article highlights how new media has changed the impacts of the modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos) on today's multimedia-consuming audiences and how the classical rhetorical canons (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory) can be reframed and updated by incorporating narrative theory to aid creators of new nonfiction digital narratives across different genres.

Creative nonfiction writing is used to interpret secondary data and produce a short story depicting events of workplace bullying in the public sector as also being acts of corruption. Creative nonfiction writing enables interrogation of, and vicarious experience of, sensitive, complex, and controversial workplace events. Readers are invited to think, and feel, the events of bullying (and corruption), as well the multiple perspectives involved. For organizations grappling with workplace bullying, understanding the behaviors as also being potentially corrupt will deepen understanding, as will recognition of the possible rationales of those involved in its downward spiral.

The present article suggests that a desirable model of creative writing in the era of digital communications and new media, growing transnational flows, neonomadic life patterns (both online and offline), and global mobility is transcultural auto/biography. By this term I identify a form of creative nonfiction particularly suited to recording and exploring the renegotiation of individual cultural identities and the re-shaping of ever more complex subjectivities and collective imaginaries in their efforts to adjust to a new age of digital communication flows, transnational processes, and cross-cultural encounters.