Author: Amelia Heffernan
Heffernan, Amelia, 2024 Urban Magic: an urban fantasy novel, and ‘Link Me Out of Here: escaping the closet of the academic essay’, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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Urban Magic: an urban fantasy novel and ‘Link Me Out of Here: escaping the closet of the academic essay’ radically reimagine the traditional Creative Writing thesis by integrating hypertextual, nonlinear pathways into the novel to create a multilayered, hypermedia exegesis that hybridizes the scholarly and creative. Urban Magic and ‘Link Me Out of Here: escaping the closet of the academic essay’ refuse the rigid hegemony of scholarly discourse by breaking out of the traditional academic essay form and embracing the 'outlaw' exegesis, an experimental form that, in this case, challenges the exclusivity and inaccessibility of high theory. The creative artefact consists of an urban fantasy novel about magic users in a close-to-ours world, where magic has been recently uncloseted. Urban Magic rebels against the idea of ‘secret magic societies’, removing the narrative magical wainscot and integrating the magical with ‘normal culture’, embodying refusal of ‘closets’, drawing from the work of Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet and my own queer experiences. The links from the otherwise traditional novel to individual sections of the exegesis, presented on webpages, is inspired by Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure; the embedded exegesis refuses the traditional exegesis structure and instead embraces Halberstam's core tenants of resisting mastery, privileging the naive, and suspecting memorialization. Individual sections that you will encounter include mini chapters on various theoretical approaches and the context of my refusal to pursue them in a traditional exegetical format, and a series of subverted explorations of the theory that explore questions of boundaries between author/text/reader and undermine the binary of scholar/fan, serious/fun and the limits of how knowledge can be understood and conveyed: a quiz, D&D stat blocks, a Choose Your Own Adventure, book lists, playlists, and other digital pages.
Keywords: queer failure, radical exegesis, urban fantasy, wainscots, secret societies, hypermedia
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Amy Matthews