Full Description
Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author's new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights.
Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book's drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry.
With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.
Contents
Part 1: Openings
Chapter 1. An Introduction
Chapter 2. Something Might Happen
Chapter 3. Always More
Interval. Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry (1): Take it to Heart
Part 2: Refrains
Chapter 4. What Has Stand-Up Ever Done for Writing as Inquiry? The Refrain, Surprise, Pete and his Lemons
Chapter 5. The Refrains of Therapy and the Everyday
Chapter 6. Three Shits: A Connection of Some Kind
Chapter 7. Counselling on a Scale of 1 To 5
Chapter 8. Out Here a Man Settles his Own Problems: Learning from John Wayne
Interval. Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry (2): The Problem and Promise of the Personal
Part 3: Reframings
Chapter 9. Once Upon a Time a Story Hit Back
Chapter 10. Shadow Bands: Thinking Therapy Diffractively
Chapter 11. W/b/rought to Life
Interval. Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry (3): The Poetics of the Hyphen
Part 4: Reframings (Continued): Shame
Chapter 12. Two Stories of Shame: Calling Upon The Cailleach
Chapter 13. Meditation on a Green Light Bulb
Chapter 14. A Third Story of Shame: Hannah Gadsby
Epilogue
