Psychogeographic Flow in Black Country fiction

Hadley-Pryce, Kerry Jacqueline (2023) Psychogeographic Flow in Black Country fiction. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis is an exploration, investigation and interrogation of experiential research into placiality through the medium of fiction. Concentrating specifically on the region in the West Midlands of the UK called the Black Country, it brings together the concepts and practice of Situationist psychogeography and Mihalyi Csíkszentmihályi’s (1975) psychological state of consciousness known as Flow into the writing of fiction. The starting point was three initial research questions: how might a methodology based on literary psychogeography and psychogeographic Flow be used to approach the reading and close analysis of selected Black Country fiction? How might such an analysis of Black Country fiction enable or inspire the production of an original, new creative piece of Black Country fiction? What might this approach reveal about placiality, the link between psychogeography and Flow and the process of producing a creative piece of Black Country fiction? This is a practice-led, dérive-based project (the dérive being the active verb in psychogeography). It is ‘agnostic’ in its approach (Webb and Brien, 2008) which allows for an exploration of psychogeography and Flow as ‘compost’ within which Black Country fiction grows into research into placiality. An element of Flow is exemplified in the construction and content of the thesis with a running interconnection between the critical, processual and creative aspects. Within the critical element, psychogeography and the state of Flow are explored and aspects of the ‘alert reverie’ (Bachelard 1971 [1960] in Löffler, 2017:98) prompt a discussion connecting the two, which leads to an investigation into the similarities between features of psychogeography, and the Black Country as a ‘borderless’ and ‘real and imagined’ place (Soja, 1996:6). As a consequence of these interconnections, the term ‘topoaesthesis’ is offered as meaning ‘sensation of place’ evoked by psychogeographic walking in the region, and this, together with literary psychogeography, is considered in the close psychogeographic reading of selected existing Black Country fiction by Anthony Cartwright (2017), Francis Brett Young (1962), Raphael Selbourne (2009) and Joel Lane (2000). Establishing these connections provides the critical apparatus for the reflexion on my own praxis and process of writing the new original piece of fiction in the form of a Black Country novel. From this new way of experiencing and interpreting psychogeography, the idea of the novel as applied philosophy is developed, using phenomenology and Deleuzean notions of deterritorialisation, and the term psychogeographic Flow emerges through and as the fiction itself. The thesis develops as a fiction-as-research concept, building on work by Leavy (2013), investigating how Black Country fiction and the Flow state in psychogeography coexist to produce a new, original contribution to both creative writing studies and psychogeography, as well as being of scholarly relevance to practice-as-research and Black Country studies. This marriage between fiction and psychogeographic research, where deterritorialisation of both results from neither being confined to disciplinary territories, means that fiction can be considered psychogeographic and vice versa. This pan-disciplinarity reflects and represents the borderlessness of the cartography of the Black Country, and within this thesis, the resulting new, original novel, God’s Country, performs as active research, being an articulation of psychogeographic Flow in Black Country fiction.