The bookcase at the end of the thesis: revisioning a literature review

Almost twenty years ago Baudrillard (1988, p 95) warned, ‘We live in a universe where there is more and more information and less and less meaning’. Since this unheeded warning, we have produced a far greater mass of information, further constraining our inner search for meaning. Many of us have become estranged from ourselves and the natural world we inhabit. As well, concepts of text, author and reader have been shifting. What then, is the role of literature in these times? In this paper I explore the relationship and nature of the Literature Review to research and the researcher by examining the importance of three literary authors in particular during the journey into, during and beyond the doctoral thesis. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent, so too does its literature. Many literary writers, theorists, educators and students are engaged in dialogues concerning the changing contexts and roles of author, text and reader. While interrogating these notions within political and sociocultural arenas, it is also necessary to debate how these reframed ideas are impacting upon the approaches taken to the Literature Review in thesis writing. Migration and access to text have historical echoes. Believed to be the bearer of ‘truth’ for the privileged few, texts once held a privileged position as Scriptures in the inner sanctuaries of learning. Yet now, in the Western world, the broad access to texts – their sheer quantity and blurred forms, and the contested nature of their content – impact greatly on the researcher and the research. It is essential for researchers to examine what constitutes a text, whose stories are being told and whose stories are being silenced. Fragmentation and distrust of the grand narratives (the stories cultures tell themselves and live by) have produced a seamlessness between the real and the imagined, between truth and fiction. This fragmentation occurred as certainties have been called into question. As children we quite naturally moved between the dimensions of the real and imagined; between truth and fiction in playful exploration and thought. Today we are empowered as coauthors of the world’s stories, and knowledge is a consensus. For, if we view the