Creative Writing and Postmodern Interdis
Creative Writing and Postmodern Interdis
Creative Writing and Postmodern Interdis
htm
Paul Dawson
Abstract
This essay intervenes in current debates about the operation of creative
writing as an academic discipline, and provides a polemical critique of
practice-led research as a basis for disciplinary identity. It argues that the
emergence of creative writing studies as a field of academic research is the
product of an ongoing tension created by the pull of centrifugal intellectual
forces that are interdisciplinary in focus and centripetal institutional forces
that are driving towards disciplinary independence.
Since the turn of the millennium, debate over whether creative writing can
be said to constitute an independent academic discipline has gained
increasing international prominence and urgency. This is not an abstract
scholarly enterprise, for its pursuit presents a vital means of developing and
positioning creative writing programs within the modern university. The
foundations for this enterprise were laid over a decade ago. In 1996 DG
Myers published The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, which
bequeathed the subject its first institutional history. This book deserves the
typically overused label of 'groundbreaking', for it provides an invaluable
account of the origins of creative writing as an 'experiment in education'
(2006: 4) designed, according to Myers, to integrate literary knowledge
with literary practice in American universities. Also in 1996, the Australian
Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) was formed, indicating a desire
in this country for a national dialogue on this burgeoning subject of study
across a number of disciplines, and initiating a sustained scholarly
engagement with creative writing as a field of academic research. As a
result of the range and scope of work published in the AAWP's journal,
TEXT, since 1997, Australia can rightly claim to be a leader in this field.
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musing on the creative process and the question of whether writing can be
taught. Some critical commentary on the subject emerged in America in the
1980s, but this tended to be hostile rather than investigative, bemoaning the
absorption of mainstream literary culture into the academy, and blaming
writing programs for the mediocre state of contemporary American
literature.
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generation, that is, 'the generation of intellectual workers who have entered
the literary field and attained professional positions in the late 1980s and
through the 1990s', and for whom the embedded presence of Theory is
taken for granted (1995: 25). The crucial institutional site for the formation
of this post-theory generation is the PhD, because it is precisely through
accredited research training that a discipline perpetuates itself. In an article
about the emerging PhD program in America, Kelly Ritter points out that
'there is most certainly a generational divide between the pre-1980s hires in
creative writing, most of whom hold the M.A. or M.F.A., and the current
crop of new hires, many of whom will hold the M.A. or M.F.A. and Ph.D'
(2001: 216). In other words, creative writing students who have been
exposed to what John Guillory calls 'the canon of Theory' in the graduate
school curriculum are now theorising their own discipline.
The recent emergence of the PhD in creative writing also exemplifies the
institutional exigencies that have facilitated the development of disciplinary
identity in this field. In her article Ritter points out the declining value of
the MFA, suggesting the degree is no longer considered a sufficient
qualification for a university teaching position unless the candidate has
several books published. Hence the PhD has become an important
additional degree for MFA graduates who hope to teach in the academy.
However, for this doctoral degree to justify its existence, Ritter argues, it
needs to be marked as professionally distinct from the MFA. Her
suggestion is that the PhD in creative writing be reconfigured towards
teacher training, specifically 'the ability to teach undergraduates in the field'
(2001: 208). In neglecting to discuss the creative dissertation itself, Ritter
demonstrates a belief that what defines creative writing as an academic
discipline (rather than the master-apprentice system offered by the MFA) is
its ability to be taught in a scholarly self-reflexive fashion, as opposed to its
ability to produce new works of literature. This focus on teaching suggests
that the creative doctoral dissertation is still to be conceived along the same
lines as the MFA dissertation: as a literary work to be circulated outside the
academy instead of a contribution to disciplinary knowledge.
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Disciplinary identity
My central argument in Creative Writing and the New Humanities was that
the historical development of the subject can be understood as a series of
ongoing educational responses to the perennial 'crisis in English Studies',
from debates between scholarship and criticism in the early part of the
twentieth century to the fundamental shifts in disciplinary knowledge
presented by the New Humanities. The widespread academic critique of
traditional categories such as 'literature', 'creativity' and 'aesthetics' in the
late twentieth century has provided an intellectual environment in which
teachers of creative writing have been able to interrogate their practice and
expand the possibilities of the subject. This has led to the development of
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I think the first question here is vitally important, but that the second
question betrays a limiting approach: of trying to determine what might
already exist but has yet to be articulated. As it turns out, Lim never
answers this question, instead concluding that if creative writing 'is to be
realized as a complementary discipline', it must overcome its 'inherent
resistance' and perform a necessary integration into the intellectual and
academic work of English' (Lim 2003: 165).
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In Australia, and in the UK, there seems to be a strong desire to define the
discipline not in terms of the skills and teacher training that can be provided
at the graduate level, but in terms of the creative work produced by staff
and research students. The reasons for this difference are institutional. In
discussing American creative writing programs, DG Myers writes: 'Today
writers are hired and promoted in academe on the basis of their writing - it
has become their equivalent of original research - and yet they have been
less successful than academics in other fields at establishing institutional
peer-review mechanisms for legitimising their own work and excluding that
of others' (2006: 6). The dilemma Myers points to is how to distinguish, in
academic terms, between writers who teach and writers who don't. It can be
easily understood, then, why, for scholars such as Ritter, the capacity for
critically-informed teaching in the contemporary academy has assumed
importance as a marker of professional distinction. In Australia, creative
writing academics do not have the luxury of their creative work being the
basis for hiring and promotion, or at least the sole basis, for writing has not
been considered the 'equivalent of original research'. The crucial
importance of research productivity for a successful academic career has
made it necessary for teachers of writing to think strategically about how
their creative work can be recognised as research.
In 2006, Jen Webb and Donna Lee Brien pointed out that over a ten-year
period since TEXT was established, 'it is possible to trace a shift … away
from pedagogical issues and towards research-oriented questions' related to
creative writing as an academic discipline (2006: 1). A search through
TEXT will reveal that in the 1990s the most common term for framing
creative work in an academic context was 'research equivalence'. The
accepted terminology is now 'research through practice', where the creative
work is the 'outcome' of 'practice-led research'.
The phrase 'research equivalence' was used by Dennis Strand in his 1998
report, Research in Creative Arts, to propose a research funding model for
academics in the visual and performing arts. Strand argued that it was
necessary to recognise the creative work of academics as equal in value to,
but different in nature from, traditional scholarly research. The key concept
underlying the argument for research equivalence is the idea that creative
work involves research in rather than about the arts: 'Their research
methodologies are in the arts, their investigations are in their practice'
(Strand 1998: xvi). According to Nigel Krauth, creative writing was not
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More importantly, I'm not sure how the concept of research through
practice helps us understand the process of writing in such a way that it
would benefit our teaching, which I think is at the core of creative writing.
Furthermore, because this concept is borrowed from the visual and
performing arts, I don't think it really addresses the textual specificity of
creative writing. For instance, the strong presence of fictocritical writing
within Australian creative writing programs demonstrates the generic
permeability of creative and scholarly work - or, performative research and
quantitative/qualitative research - in a way that the relation between, say,
dance or painting and an academic dissertation does not.
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Postmodern interdisciplinarity
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In his 2004 book, Theory Matters, Vincent Leitch argues that postmodern
culture is characterised by disorganisation or disaggregation, and that this is
manifested in the university in the post-theory proliferation of disciplinary
subfields. This proliferation, Leitch says, 'contributes to the postmodern
disorganization of the modern bureaucratic departmentalized university ...
The new postmodern interdisciplines challenge the autonomous discipline,
or, more precisely, each discipline per se contains, it turns out, ineradicable
elements of other disciplines' (2004: ix). Leitch lists over a dozen of these
subfields, including women's and gender studies, film and media studies,
whiteness studies and cultural studies, arguing that 'these are all
postmodern (inter)disciplines, formed in the late twentieth century, and in
certain specific ways also counterdisciplines, that is, constructed
self-consciously against the oversights, blindspots, or ingrained prejudices
of the modern disciplines' (2004: 169).
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There are admirable sentiments being expressed here, but the metaphor for
the discipline is instructive; in fact, it resonates with Henry James' famous
'house of fiction', operating as a kind of scholarly mirror image of this
metaphor. For James, the house of fiction offers a million possible angles to
the world as perceived by the artist, or the fictional world created by the
artist. The house has a myriad range of windows which serve as vantage
points from which to perceive characters in this world, but the windows are
only tools, the literary form which enables authors their distinct approach to
their subject.[4] For Krauth and Brady, scholars are standing outside the
'discipline of writing', with various scholarly approaches offering a variety
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For me, Krauth and Brady's introduction demonstrates that the emergence
of creative writing studies is the product of an ongoing tension created by
the pull of centrifugal intellectual forces which are interdisciplinary in
focus and centripetal institutional forces which are driving towards
disciplinary independence. Rather than resolving this question, I suggest
the most productive approach is, to use Readings' phrase, to install
disciplinarity as a permanent question.
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This does not mean we should not offer research higher degrees, what
Krauth and Brady call 'the jewels in the university crown' (2006: 14), or
that we should no longer lobby for institutional parity and funding equality,
but that the study and profession of creative writing in universities must
avoid becoming what Readings calls a mode of 'unthinking participation in
institutional-bureaucratic life.' For me this becomes a possibility when a
concept motivated by the desire to attract funding for the creative
publications of teachers of writing is taken seriously as a new paradigm of
research around which our disciplinary identity should cohere.
Notes
1 Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice (2006), edited by Nigel Krauth and
Tess Brady, provides a good example of this range. The standard genre of
writing handbooks is also developing, as evidenced by two recent publications:
Hazel Smith's The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative
Writing (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005) which aims 'to theorise the process of
writing by relating it to the literary and cultural concepts which students
encounter on other university courses' (vii); and Amanda Boulter's Writing
Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007) which 'attempts to unpick the oppositional logic that has developed
around creative writing, a logic that sets "creativity" against "criticism" as if
they are utterly distinct elements of writing' (1). In 'The Future of Creative
Writing' (2007) I argue that the cumulative effect of ongoing critiques of
creative writing pedagogy has been the emergence of a new aesthetic in the
poetics of creative writing: a shift from the 'sublime' to the 'avant-garde'. return
to text
2 This is in fact the title of a new scholarly anthology edited by Graeme Harper
and Jeri Kroll: Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy
(Multilingual Matters, 2007). The field of creative writing 'studies' might also
include this shortlist of books: Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writer's Workshop:
Origins, Emergence and Growth (Iowa UP, 1980); Wendy Bishop and Hans
Ostrom (eds), Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory
and Pedagogy (National Council of Teachers of English, 1994); DG Myers, The
Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (Prentice Hall, 1996; Chicago
UP, 2006); Katherine Haake, What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and
Creative Writing Studies (National Council of Teachers of English, 2000); Paul
Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005); Tim
Mayers, (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing and the Future of
English Studies (Pittsburgh UP, 2005); Anna Leahy (ed), Power and Identity in
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3 It is worth noting that a PhD in Creative Writing was first offered as early as
1931, in the School of Letters at the University of Iowa. Here 'imaginative
writing', as it was then called, was conceived as one element of graduate
specialisation alongside language, literary history and literary criticism. DG
Myers argues that creative writing first found identity as a discipline in this
context: 'in the first stage creative writing settled into a discipline while only in
the second stage did the teachers of this discipline make themselves bodily into
a profession' (147). This is manifested in the shift from the School of Letters to
the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1939, and the eventual establishment of the
Associated Writing Programs in 1967, which facilitated what Myers calls an
'elephant machine' of teacher training. According to Myers: 'In the first stage
creative writing was the perfection of one tendency in the history of criticism. It
was an effort to handle a single order of human discourse in a way that would
yield a unified body of theory. It was the movement of criticism toward
constructive knowledge - knowledge how conceived as both the only means of
access to and somehow the equivalent of knowledge that' (147). One can see
connections between Myer's account of disciplinary knowledge and the
argument for practice-led research. Nonetheless, if one reads Literary
Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods (1941), the manifesto for the School of
Letters edited by Norman Foerster, it can be seen that the word 'discipline'
relates more to a particular type of graduate training rather than to a body of
knowledge. It seems most appropriate to say that, in the School of Letters,
creative writing was conceived as one methodological approach to knowledge
in literary studies alongside criticism, history and language. return to text
4 The metaphor of the house of fiction can be found in James' preface to The
Portrait of a Lady. See Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed RP Blackmur,
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934, p46. return to text
Amato, Joe, and Kassia Fleisher 2002 'Reforming creative writing pedagogy:
history as knowledge, knowledge as activism', Electronic Book Review,
<http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/nubby> return
to text
Bizzaro, Patrick 2004 'Research and reflection in English studies: the special
case of creative writing', College English 66.3: 294-309
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Dawson, Paul 2007 'The future of creative writing', in Steve Earnshaw (ed) The
creative writing handbook, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 78-90
return to text
Dawson, Paul 2005 Creative writing and the new humanities, London/New
York: Routledge return to text
Donaldson, Ian 1990 'Defining and defending the humanities,' in AM Gibbs (ed)
The relevance of the humanities, occasional paper 8, Canberra: Australian
Academy of the Humanities, 18-36 return to text
Foerster, Norman (ed) 1941 Literary scholarship: its aims and methods, Chapel
Hill: North Carolina UP return to text
Frow, John 1992 'Beyond the disciplines: cultural studies', in KK Ruthven (ed)
Beyond the disciplines: the new humanities, Canberra: Australian Academy of
the Humanities, 22-8 return to text
Gillies, Malcolm 1998 'The creative arts and research', Proceedings of the
National Symposium on Research in the Performing Arts, Victorian College of
the Arts, University of Melbourne, May 15-18, 26-32 return to text
Green, Chris 2001 'Materializing the sublime reader: cultural studies, reader
response, and community service in the creative writing workshop', College
English, 64.2, 153-74 return to text
Guillory, John 1993 Cultural capital: the problem of literary canon formation,
Chicago: Chicago UP return to text
Haseman, Brad 2007 'Tightrope writing: creative writing programs in the RQF
environment.' TEXT 11.1 <http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/april07
/haseman.htm> return to text
Krauth, Nigel, and Tess Brady 2006 'Towards creative writing theory', in Krauth
and Brady (eds) Creative writing: theory beyond practice, Teneriffe: Post
Pressed, 13-18 return to text
Krauth, Nigel, and Tess Brady 1997 'Editorial: the new journal of the AAWP',
TEXT 1.1 <http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/april97/apriled.htm>
return to text
Kroll, Jeri, and Steve Evans 2005 'How to write a "how to write" book: the
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Leitch, Vincent B 2003 Theory matters, New York: Routledge return to text
Mourad Jr, Roger P 1997 'At the forefront: postmodern interdisciplinarity', The
Review of Higher Education 20.2, 113-40 return to text
Mayers, Tim 2005 (Re)writing craft: composition, creative writing, and the
future of English studies, Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy and
Culture, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP return to text
Merod, Jim 1987 The political responsibility of the critic, Ithaca: Cornell UP
return to text
Myers, DG 2006 The elephants teach: creative writing since 1880 (2nd ed),
Chicago: Chicago UP return to text
Shelnutt, Eve 1989 'Notes from a cell: creative writing programs in isolation', in
Joseph M Moxley (ed), Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy,
Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 3-24 return to text
Watkins, Evan 1989 Work time: English departments and the circulation of
cultural value, Stanford: Stanford UP return to text
Webb, Jen, and Donna Lee Brien 2006 'Strategic directions for research in
writing: a wish list', TEXT 10.1 <http://www.textjournal.com.au/april06
/webbbrien.htm> return to text
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Paul Dawson is the author of Creative Writing and the New Humanities
(Routledge, 2005) and Imagining Winter (Interactive Press, 2006), which
won the national IP Picks Best Poetry Award in 2006. He is currently a
Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the
University of New South Wales.
TEXT
Vol 12 No 1 April 2008
http://www.textjournal.com.au
Editors: Nigel Krauth & Jen Webb
[email protected]
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