Permissions: On Expanding the Field of Writing

BACKGROUND: Nonfiction is a disruptive literary category that cannot be subsumed into stable definitions of either fact or fiction (Zavazadeh 1976, Lehman 1997). It has been described as ‘a literary/artistic category built on a negation’ (Carlin & Rendle-Short 2013) a ‘conditional state of being, and a negation of genre’ (D'Agata 2009). In her seminal essay 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' Krauss (1979) showed how a cultural field that had reached this kind of historic and discursive negation, could be opened into an 'expanded field' in which positioning becomes the new logic of the practice. CONTRIBUTION The commissioned essay 'Permissions' articulates the creative practice methodology the Writing in the Expanded Field’ that adapts Krauss's method of expansion for the field of writing. By bringing this method to bear on the literary category of ‘nonfiction’, an expanded field of practice is opened that theoretically locates lateral moves between literary genres, mediums and rhetorical modes. As in the expanded field of postmodern sculpture, in an expanded field of writing it is position within the field rather than medium or genre that is the new logic of practice. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE This essay was commissioned and published by ACCA in the digital publication Writing in the Expanded Field (2018), as part of a public program of the same name that ran in conjunction with ACCA’s major exhibition Eva Rothschild: Kosmos the first solo survey of the London-based, Irish artist. Its commission and publication by this leading contemporary art institution recognises the methodology as an innovation that has applications and impact outside the academy, in interdisciplinary communities of practice. The essay provided the methodological framework for understanding the diverse outcomes of this writing program that included ekphrastic poetics; autoethnographic narratives; embodied and digital writing materialities; dimensional essaying and hypertextual criticism.