Creative Writing in the Threshold

Traina, Elena (2025) Creative Writing in the Threshold. Doctoral thesis, Falmouth University / University of the Arts London.

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Abstract / Summary

Creative Writing in the Threshold: Narratives on Point of View and Perspective, Intertextuality, Place and Setting, and Metaphor is a thesis that combines academic and creative writing to investigate narratives by tutors in Ibero-American academic institutions. Accompanying my research is a handmade artist’s book that calls itself The Diviner, who intervenes in my chapters in the form of marginalia, expanding on my qualitative research with autoethnographic and metafictional references. Underpinned by an epistemology of between-standing – e.g., learning from the liminal space or “threshold” between creative writing, pedagogy and research –, my go-finding approach defines the sought encounters with the Other, between disciplines and modes, and with other languages via literary translation. Tutors’ narratives in translation are curated to weave a tapestry of different perspectives on four key threshold aspects that apply narrative concepts to creative writing pedagogy: point of view and perspective, intertextuality, place and setting, and metaphor. Reframing the tutor of creative writing as a narrator, I explore what these aspects reveal about method but also the narrative choices that they imply: how tutors craft their narratives, how they manifest their cognizance, where they situate themselves on the psychic distance spectrum, and what tone they adopt (Chapter One); what criteria guide their selection of exemplary literary works (Chapter Two); how tutors and students are affected by place, and how tutors design their settings (Chapter Three); what the workshop as a metaphor means to them, and what other metaphors they associate with creative writing as an institutionalised discipline and as an artistic practice (Chapter Four). Foregrounding plurality, subjectivity, unfinishedness and
aesthetic coherence, this thesis performs its findings as much as it narrates them, inviting readers to reimagine research in the field of creative writing studies.

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