Awkward Positions: the Use and Misuse of Failure in Creative Writing

This practice-led thesis investigates the creative use of failure in prose writing. Drawing on queer theory’s ‘anti-redemptive’ archive (Nichols, 2010, p.5) and on hybrid prose by writers such as Lydia Davis (2009, 2014, 2018) and Julietta Singh (2018), it defines failure as a creative, non-teleological research process which has the potential to resist value systems. It uses this definition to construct a critical and a creative cluster of experiments which use different forms of writing to performatively explore the aesthetic and theoretical tensions between what creative writers do with failure and what queer theorists claim failure can do. Each cluster of experiments places creative and critical modes of writing into purposefully awkward relation. The critical cluster develops an experimental reading methodology as a means of teasing out the creative facets of Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011) on the one hand, and the critical facets of Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t (2014) on the other. It addresses the writer’s approach to the body as a source of un/knowing. Similarly, the stories, essays and fragments in the creative cluster are not only narratives about failure; they are animated by my felt experience of failure during the writing process. They reflexively examine the ways in which my writing practice both resists and is complicit with high-pressure, success-orientated environments which devalue felt experience. As such, they explore failure’s failures, as well as its possibilities. The thesis’s contribution lies also in its form, which attempts to find, in its failure to fit into either the publishing industry’s definition of a successful trade manuscript, or the academy’s definition of a successful Creative Writing (CW) PhD, ways of challenging success narratives in both fields. Each cluster’s ‘failures’ enacts an attempt to find value in the spaces between CW and its neighbouring fields of literary, queer and critical studies.