How to do things with words: textual typologies and doctoral writing

The paper reflects on modalities and typologies of writing practice within the fine art practice-based doctorate, exploring how looking at ways in which artists have engaged with writing as process, practice and visual/sonic form, can better inform the ways that doctoral writing itself may develop. Using tools developed through a close reading of Katie McLeod's work on typologies of doctoral writing, conducted in 1995, the paper generates a discussion about the relationship between art's methods and critical writing practice. It suggests that the practice-based doctoral project might be considered as a mutually constitutive one, combining both art making and poetics within an integrated whole, and arguing, with McLeod, that in the practice-based doctorate we are seeing the re-emergence of the artist as scholar, informed by practice and alive to art's investments in writing's digital, visual, performative and sonic forms in a period that theorists have dubbed the late age of print, an age in which the status, form and function of writing, and of print media, are being radically and productively challenged.