A redacted history

BACKGROUND Current international debates around creative nonfiction writing champion the need for new literary forms and genres to authentically represent our fragmented subjectivity and accelerated experience of contemporary global culture. In particular, American writer David Shields has championed lyric and experimental forms of nonfiction writing in his acclaimed manifesto Reality Hunger. These debates foreground nonfiction as a rich theatre for epistemological and creative investigation, a highly conceptual literary form that reaches beyond conventional genres. CONTRIBUTION The collage essay A Redacted History takes a primary historical document of personal significance and 'remixes' it in a collage form to express a different edge of its truth claim as a history of well-to-do colonial womanhood in twentieth century Melbourne. Formally, the essay gestures toward a new kind of artistic genre that might be defined as literary-visual, that is, communicating both in a literary way through its use of language but also visually, through using that language as an image itself. A Redacted History mixes the literary form of the essay with the visual language of highly graphic text-based visual art such as the work of Ed Ruscha. This becomes an innovative interpretation and presentation of existing knowledge. SIGNIFICANCE The significance of this research is its success as an experiment in the nonfiction written word - a redacted synthesis of existing knowledge and artefacts in a new and creative way. This is evident in its publication as the lead essay in the peer-reviewed Fall 2012 Issue of US literary journal Defunct, edited by Robin Hemley, Professor Emeritus of the nonfiction program at the Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, and Director of Writing Programs at Yale-NUS College Singapore. Further to this, the essay was then selected through peer review to be nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the USA.