PhD Creative Writing:
In Pieces –
Marks of
Violence, or
Identification
Thesis
Writing Between Poison and Cure: Embodiment, Inheritance, and the Ethics of Fragmentary Life-Writing
About
This PhD is a hybrid creative–critical project comprising a book-length experimental lyric memoir (In Pieces) and a critical thesis in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. The research investigates the ethics of fragmentary life-writing in the context of suicide, inherited trauma, and chronic illness within a family. It asks how writing can attend to the dead and to embodied inheritance without appropriating, aestheticising, commodifying, or resolving what must remain ethically unsettled.In Pieces reconstructs the life and death of the author’s maternal grandmother, who died by suicide in 1977. The memoir is composed through fragments, digressive essay, personal reflection, and analysis of partial archival traces—coronial documents, photographs, family anecdotes, bodily marks, and an unmarked grave. Rather than seeking narrative coherence or causal explanation, the work dwells in absence, opacity, and non-knowledge as ethical commitments. Knowledge emerges through what is missing, withheld, or resistant to articulation.
The critical thesis theorises fragmentation not as aesthetic rupture alone but as an embodied and agential methodology informed by feminist, disability-aware, and hybrid genre practices. Central to the project’s original contribution is the development of post-vitam, a creative–critical methodology for writing suicide and its afterlives in resistance to institutional, narrative, and epistemic closure.
The project synthesises life-writing studies, disability theory, feminist ethics, psychoanalysis, and medical humanities to theorise writing as an ethically ambivalent practice—a pharmakon in Derrida’s sense, simultaneously poison and cure, incision and scar. Writing is understood not as a route to repair or narrative mastery but as a practice that risks harm while offering forms of care. The creative and critical components operate dialogically: the memoir enacts ethical tensions, formal disruptions, and affective disturbances that the thesis theorises.