Dawson: Chapter 5

So here's where Dawson gets down to theory. He asserts that "Creative Writing needs to answer to the critique of authorship and of the category of literature offered by Theory, rather than simply rejecting this critique as unhelpful or deleterious to literary culture" (161). Then he breaks down CW's responses into three types: integration, avant-garde, and political.

Not much to show for the first type. "Integration" refers to any attempt to integrate Theory and CW. There's a nice comment on the effort to critique poststructuralist theory through CW practice. He says that the "domain of inquiry" of poststructuralist theory "is linguistic and textual meaning, not the creative process. So attempts to illuminate or interrogate it through the practice of writing seem to be beside the point" (162).

He cites a source that gives a rather bad response to Barthes: "It leads Miles to claim that Barthes's theory of the author entering his own death at the moment of writing enables students to understand how writers assume a narrative persona or enter the voice of their characters" (163), which seems to miss the point of Barthes entirely. Might be worth looking up when treating Barthes, although Dawson also cautions that "many writers see the death of the author as the apotheosis and end point of Theory" (164), so too central an examination of Barthes would be a party foul.

Dawson's "avant-garde" response to Theory is essentially a treatment of Australian fictocriticism. Not really my thing, so I'll not comment.

The Political model offers more interesting material, mostly for his citations of Said and Chris Green. He cites Said as critiquing Deconstruction literary analysis as the "new New Criticism," and Green offers a vision of the writing workshop as socially engaged. Cites also the Amato and Fleisher article that you can get to through the "ebr on cw" link at top right.

He summarizes the political approach like so:

...a desire to demystify cliches of literary creativity and reform the writing workshop as a site of political contestation. The focus is not on formal experimentation but on the pragmatics of production and reception within the framework of Cultural Studies. (172)

He cites Marcell Freiman (2001) as someone who feels that Eliot's Modernist view of the relation between creativity and criticism still has some merit. Cites David Galef (2000) on the relationship between CW workshops and identity politics.

Dawson promises his own investigation of politics and the workshop in his conclusion.

He only gets to his own approach to CW and Theory after his survey. He opens this by distinguishing CW from other disciplines by stating that there is "no coherent body of knowledge to pass on" (178), which somehow doesn't sit right with me.

He proceeds:

One way to conceive of Creative Writing as a discipline is to understand that it produces knowledge by an interaction between formalist criticism and practical craft. This is because a practical device of literary composition, such as a point of view or narrative voice (a technical choice made by the writer as to who sees and who speaks in the work), is also a critical tool of analysis (a formalist category for the classification and study of literary works)...If poetics, in Todorov's formulation, negotiates the boundary between literary structure and individual work, or between science and interpretation, then the same negotiation occurs in literature itself. A specific work of literature not only reveals the structure or general laws of literature, but interrogates and expands them. It is a contribution not just to the practical creative art of writing, but to the study of literature as well. (178)

Knowledge [in Literary Studies] is constituted by the interaction of literature and criticism...a dialogic process, a ceaseless interaction between permeable modes of writing. (178)

English is a dialogic engagement between literature and criticism, not in a hierarchical sense of...first-order artistic practice and second-order intellectual apprehension, but in the sense of an ongoing series of interactions between complementary modes of writing. In this case Creative Writing is not necessarily the teaching of writing literature alongside the teaching of writing criticism, but a mode of literary research within the academy. (179)

So he's relying heavily on formalism here, for understandable reasons. And I'd say his treatment of the relationship between formalism and practice is the best I've come across so far. Intuitive and to-the-point. Then he progresses to a defense of the discipline, which I sort of think stretches the point a bit. Not that its not nice to think of poems and novels as "research" equal to that of scholarly work...I guess...Not sure what to make of that, actually.

All in all, the chapter was much less than I'd hoped it would be. Not a thoroughgoing engagement with Theory. Just a "survey" of his three models and then a bit of a formalist hurrah.

Leads:

This is the one I'm most excited about:
Green, Chris (2001). 'Materializing the Sublime Reader: Cultural Studies, Reader Response, and Community Service in the Creative Workshop', College English 64.2: 153-74.

And this is worth looking up:
Said, Edward (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Page 159.

And I suppose I may have to deal with this at some point:
Miles, Robert (1992). 'Creative Writing, Contemporary Theory and the English Curriculum', in Moria Monteith and Robert Miles (eds) Teaching Creative Writing: Theory and Practice, Buckingham: Open University Press, 34-44.

I can't tell if the identity politics guy is worth hunting down or not.