Harry Ransom Centre - Investigating the creative and critical processes of Rachel Cusk, Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes

I hope to come to the Harry Ransom Centre and access the papers of a selection of outstanding contemporary novelists whose creative work is at least in part experimental, both in narrative structures and techniques. I want to read about and learn from their creative processes, documented in their notebooks, correspondences, essays and edits/drafts, as they pushed the form and explored what fiction can do. These techniques include, but are not limited to, disrupted chronology, fragmentations, white space, patterning, sequencing, unusual or multiple points of view and constructions and representations of the self, all of which I explore and utilise in my own creative work. My practice based PhD is composed of interlinking critical and creative parts, specifically focussed on assessing the use of the polyphonic (multiple voices). I am putting polyphony (in this age of social media) under scrutiny not just as method but also as a subject. I am interested in researching the symbiotic and essential relationship between a writers critical self awareness and creative endeavour as evidenced through their papers, as this is also the process of my PhD. The Harry Ransom Centre has extensive archives and although I have identified specific collections I wish to examine there are many more that are of interest, including Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee and Penelope Fitzgerald. This opportunity would be of immense benefit to my work academically and creatively.