Fictional Writing

In the late 1980s, Jocelyn Sheppard and Donald Hartman surveyed 69 authors of novels written as doctoral dissertations, chiefly in the fields of English literature and writing, within 31 North American doctoral programs that had accepted dissertations written in a genre of literary fiction. Other disciplines in the social sciences have been more cautious in taking up such alternatives. For example, at the time of this writing (2007), Timothy Mennel's dissertation Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses's New York appeared to be the first doctoral thesis of its kind in the field of urban geography.

During the mid-1990s, several well-known education scholars debated the question of whether or not a work of fiction could be acceptable as a doctoral thesis; Arthur Saks's edited account of a public debate between Elliot Eisner (for the affirmative) and Howard Gardner (for the negative) is a well-documented example. Nevertheless, Hofstra University had already decided this question several years earlier by [Page 339]awarding a doctorate in educational administration to Peter Sellitto for his novel Balancing Acts. Other universities to accept novels as doctoral dissertations in education include the University of British Columbia (Rishma Dunlop's Boundary Bay) and the University of Toronto (Douglas Gosse's Jackytar, which also has the distinction of being commercially published).

But how can one accept fictional writing in the literature of social research? In much everyday speech, fiction is equated with falsehood, whereas nonfiction is taken to designate a true story. If one assumes that research is chiefly concerned with documenting facts without distortion in “true” stories, then one might conclude that there is no place for fictional writing in social inquiry. Rob Walker was among the first educational researchers to question such assumptions in his essay “On the Uses of Fiction in Educational Research—(and I Don't Mean Cyril Burt).” Walker's reference to Burt gestures toward colloquial understandings of fiction as a binary opposite of truth—Burt was posthumously accused of falsifying data in his influential twin studies that he claimed heredity was a more significant determiner of human intelligence than environment. Walker (1981) argues that fiction might be “the only route to some kinds of truth” (p. 163) and demonstrates that lightly fictionalized case studies (e.g., accounts that use pseudonyms and/or composite characters, places, or events) ameliorate some of the difficulties raised by issues of confidentiality. Such fictions are usually based on extensive empirical data and change the truth very little.

The conventional binary opposition of fact and fiction—and other binaries implied by this opposition, such as real and imaginary—obscures the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between textual representations of the world “out there” and the worlds constructed in texts. It is important to note that having doubts about the referential adequacy of such binaries does not necessarily constitute an antirealist position, but rather these doubts may signal distrust of storytelling practices motivated by what Sandra Harding calls the desire for one true story, a desire which drives much research in the modern Western sciences. Desires for one true story have also driven the construction of narrative strategies in which fact and fiction are mutually exclusive categories and particular kinds of facts, such as scientific facts and historical facts are equated with reality—claims to ontological status for the worlds that scientists and historians imagine.

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