ABSTRACT
Most social researchers are not literary writers, and they have been punished when they have tried to be literary. Like writers, editors need a framework for evaluating the new work. A two-sided thesis is suggested. First, experimental writing must be well crafted, engaging writing capable of being respected by critics of literature as well as by social scientists. Second, self-referential works must do more than put the self of the writer on the line, or tell realist emotional stories about self-renewal, crisis, or catharsis. The poetic, narrative text has been criticized on several grounds, and these criticisms are directly connected to the defining features of the genre, namely the emphasis on the personal, reflective text and the absence of a public method that would allow critics to assess the so-called validity of the author's assertions. There remains a pressing need to invent a reflexive form of social science writing that turns ethnography and experimental literary texts back onto one another.
