WHAT FALLS BETWEEN

Abstract

This is an interdisciplinary dissertation--in construction and content. It is an exploration of in-betweenness in text and selfhood. Increasingly, as craft, pedagogy, and scholarship evolve and change, a wider space opens for the blurred areas between genres and categories. From "pure" history texts, to highly subjective examples of 'life-writing," narratives cross borders, blurring lines (such as "true" and "false") that once appeared stark and rigid. Ethnography, life-writing, and fiction all concern themselves with creating meaningful representations of "self" and "other" through narrative. Language, structure, and voice--aspects of craft frequently corralled with creative writing--are in fact equally important to, and co-dependent on, the "objective" reasoning of "fact"-based writing and scholarship. In its widest definition, this dissertation is a self-reflexive ethnography, inhabiting various genres, crossing borders both creative and scholarly, that consider the author's own blurred identity, and the borders of culture negotiated as an individual and writer. At the core of this thesis is the assumption that personal experience is a form of valid research. The value of the "I" is an overarching, organizing principle of this text. Each chapter addresses particular aspects of categorization: identity, genre, and their interrelations, while certain key themes and questions (gender, ethnicity, place, identity, the politics of words, language, craft, pedagogy, and aesthetics) resonate throughout.