The Write of Passage: Reflections on Writing a Dissertation in Narrative Methodology
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2003
Keywords
narrative, identity, autoethnography, rite-of-passage, writing, dissertation, modern, post-modern
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-4.2.712
Abstract
In this essay I explore, reflect upon and theorize my experiences as a doctoral student writing a dissertation in the field of narrative studies. The inquiry concentrates on the problematic tensions that are unique to academic writing in qualitative disciplines, tensions with which I dealt and grappled extensively during my work. I wish to reflect, through the writing of a theoretically informed autoethnography, on the space inscribed between the proposal and the dissertation, and thus on the young scholar's initiation journey through a constructed, narrative-in-becoming space, and on the relationship between the backpackers' narratives of identity and change, which I researched, and my own. In doing so I will evocatively problematize the epitome of the academic rite-of-passage, i.e. the writing of a modern dissertation, in times of post-modern inquiry and writing. The discussion is informed by the experience of travel and journey which took place between the interviewees' travel narratives and my own (in the form of a dissertation writing); between "field" and "office"; between positivist and interpretive paradigms; between proposal and dissertation, between paternal and maternal sources of writing, and between academic/scientific and poetic expression. The essay offers contributions to the inquiry into reflexivity and subjectivity within the growing paradigm of qualitative methodology, to the inquiry of rites-of-passage into communities and institutions, and it problematizes the possibility that narrative can contain and convey the post-modern, overwhelmed and fractured self.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
No
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Forum: Qualitative Social Research, v. 4, issue 2
Scholar Commons Citation
Noy, Chaim, "The Write of Passage: Reflections on Writing a Dissertation in Narrative Methodology" (2003). Communication Faculty Publications. 648.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/648
