Rush to judgment: Aestheticising the double frame of the post-postmodern performative narrative: A novella and exegesis

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of scholars and critics have documented a post-postmodern ethos in cultural aesthetics. An important contributor to the study of this trend is Raoul Eshelman, whose theory of ‘performatism’ offers a systematic, monist approach to these developments in literature, art, architecture and film. In his analysis of literary texts, Eshelman identifies and theorises a new type of narrative, one which does not entirely abandon postmodern strategies of irony and scepticism, but which seeks to turn such strategies toward outcomes that emphasise stability of meaning, unity, belief in the fictional world, and transcendence leading to narrative closure. In addition to under-representation in the scholarly literature to date, performatism as a framework for creative practice remains unexplored, and a systematised performatist analysis of crime writing is yet to be produced. This project seeks to address these gaps in creative and critical practice through the production of an original crime novella and exegesis, examining and extending performatist aesthetics and theory. In order to achieve these outcomes, a novel, qualitative methodology is implemented. Performatism’s reading strategy is ‘reverse-engineered’ and its literary devices adopted as a creative writing strategy for the novella. Performatism is further employed as an analytical tool with which to illuminate the performatist strategies and techniques deployed in the novella. Bringing the technical aspects of creative writing into focus, the exegetical component of the research offers a tenable method for testing the feasibility of a contemporary, alternative perspective in literary aesthetics and theory to take crime writing beyond poststructural and postmodern pluralistic approaches. In so doing, the exegesis also suggests a new way of thinking about the creative-critical nexus that links the disparate fields of creative writing and critical practice.