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(2018) Practical spirituality and human development, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Creative nonfiction is everything
postmodernism, groundlessness, and the dual portrait
Elizabeth S. Gunn
pp. 137-153
Everything is creative nonfiction. This postmodern concept refers to the decentralizing, fragmenting mood of what has taken place ontologically and epistemologically over at least the past 30 years or, as some argue, since the Enlightenment. More specifically, postmodernism might be understood as a systemic and ever-reaching breakdown in master narratives throughout Western thought. This idea is instructive in its relationship to the notion of practical spirituality. The term practical spirituality is postmodern in and of itself, trending away from master narratives of religion and religious practices. Groundlessness is commonly understood as giving up the pain that comes from attachment to people, places, things, and concepts: it is the openness that one experiences when he or she realizes that there is nothing to which one can hold. Therefore, groundlessness offers us a way into practical spirituality, a lens through which to view conflict (spiritual, interpersonal, social, global). Groundless underlines the postmodern; the postmodern has finally caught up with and given us the genre of creative nonfiction, which, one could argue, is everything.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-0803-1_10
Full citation:
Gunn, E. S. (2018)., Creative nonfiction is everything: postmodernism, groundlessness, and the dual portrait, in A. K. Giri (ed.), Practical spirituality and human development, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137-153.
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