title: A Novel Danced
title: A Nietzschean Approach to Long-Form Prose-Fiction Through Somatic Practice
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Woof, Emily
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2023

description: This practice-based PhD project consists of two parts: a novel titled
 Ecstatic (worth 80% of the overall submission) and a critical thesis
 (20%). It concerns the connection between verbal and non-verbal forms of
 expression, specifically the extent to which dance practices can engender
 or inform prose fiction. I am concerned with the relationship between
 narrative and the moving body, and with questions of simultaneity and
 (in)congruence, with a particular focus on ways in which, for creative
 purposes, the expressive body might be experienced at the same time as the
 writing mind. To explore these questions, I conjugate different
 methodologies of writing, traditional and experimental, to find the most
 effective expression of dance in prose. 
 
 
 I take the dancing body as both theme and narrative for my novel Ecstatic.
 In so doing I am asking how successfully the contemporary novel as form
 can articulate the dancing body. This plays itself out most
 straightforwardly at the levels of narrative, character and location: the
 setting is an alternative dance community; the story is told from the
 perspectives of five different bodies/characters as we follow them through
 a period of social violence and unrest. Short chapters, focused on
 individuals, are punctuated by extended sessions of improvised dance in
 which the bodies/characters encounter each other and become entangled in
 unanticipated ways. Dance itself becomes the activity and the site of
 salvation, inspiration and destruction.
 
 
 In the academic thesis, my primary theoretical framework is Nietzschean
 philosophy and more specifically, those aspects of what I call the
 Nietzschean “counter-tradition” to dualist thinking. This
 counter-tradition reflects profoundly on the grounding of experience in
 the body, on an understanding of the self as multiple rather than unitary,
 and on the move away from ideologies based in binary notions of self/other
 and body/mind, rooted in Platonic idealism. 
 
 
 Ideas of congruence and incongruence define my exploration of the ways in
 which “writing the body” has been practised and theorised, covering
 performance practices, traditional literary writing, feminist theory,
 cognitive science, and recent philosophies of consciousness. I assert that
 Nietzsche’s ecstatic paradigm provides an enabling frame for my research,
 specifically as his critique of Platonic dualism engages with the
 splitting of the distinctive creative forces he terms Apollonian and
 Dionysian. In considering how the moving body figures in Nietzsche’s
 writing, and the profound influence of Nietzsche on early twentieth
 century dance pioneers, thinkers and novelists, I explore the proposition
 that the notion of dance itself embodies Nietzsche’s most persuasive
 response to the sense of despair, loneliness, and fear implicit in the
 claim that “God is dead, and we have killed him”.
 
 
 In the second half of this thesis, I asses my own novel in terms of the
 English-language novelistic tradition within which I work, offering
 several “snapshots” of how certain writers have thus far examined the
 dancing body, and indeed thought with the body within the novel. With
 Nietzsche as my guide, I assess the results of my experimentation with two
 specific somatic methodologies: Ecstatic Dance and Authentic Movement. In
 a series of practical case studies and with analysis of passages from my
 novel, I explore how effective these practices are for the dancing
 novelist. 
 
 
 In the conclusion, I summarise my discoveries of this largely Nietzschean
 approach to the moving body and creative writing, pointing to future
 research that builds on these discoveries. Alluding to Deleuze’s concept
 of transcendental immanence, I suggest potential connections with
 Authentic Movement, a somatic practice in which the mover’s awareness can
 expand to embrace and bear witness to past narrative at the same time as
 present movement: the “languaging” of direct bodily experience on
 consciously different levels correlates to the spread consciousness of the
 novelistic voice.