The Exegesis Point - PhDs in creative writing

Ray Robinson started his PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University at the same time as myself. In the second year his book Electricity was already published by Picador. Click on the 'Academic' button of his website
and you can read what part the PhD played in his process - and how he is now moving on to what he terms the 'exegesis', which he's calling 'Making Electricity'.
I might start calling my own final stage 'exegesis' - sounds appropriately grand. My own 20,000 words is termed 'Living on the Edge: Ectopia and its context". For a while this section was going to be called 'The Autobiography of a Book', the book giving her own account of her creation. These PhDs are odd things though - creative writing departments sit inside English departments, who in effect seem to feel like they are giving harbour to a storm. My own account of the makings of my novel comes replete with footnotes - and in fact the book did gain from a breadth of comparative reading that I would not normally have brought into the creative process. Also to a reading / re-reading of all of James Purdy's novels, and an interview with the man. The 'exegesis' is a compromise between creativity and academia, but even as a new creative process that is interesting. Come the viva, the whole work has to be defensible in front of someone who may come from a purely academic setting. My final PhD job is to tauten the academic arguments of this section of the work.
In publishing Electricity Ray was already required to make the compromises required by the commercial world. He wanted wholly black pages to represent the lead character's collapse into a period of epilepsy. The editors insisted on pages of blurred script instead. What's the game here? Saving money on ink?
Standards of the readings you get on the PhD programme are incredibly high. It's a treat to be freed from commercial logic for a time and simply be steered toward ever finer creative cohesion and breadth of invention.