Day: January 5, 2009

Works in Progress

28 Days of Thesis Updates: Day One

TO START, AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT THE EXEGESIS IS When you do a creative writing PhD they don’t necessarily ask you to write a thesis. Instead, they get you to write a creative project (in my case, a whopping great lot of short stories) and then write an short exegesis that serves as a kind of thesis-substitute where you do thesis-type-things such as critical analysis of the work and practice, but done with the knowledge that you’re the writer of the creative text up front and center. The irony is that no-one really knows what the boundaries are when you’re doing these yet – the idea only really started to gain traction in the last two decades or so (from what I’m seeing, anyway; the name comes from analytical studies of the bible, and they’ve been doing it for a lot while) and there are relatively sparse examples of what a good exegetical document looks like out there. And, just