Dawson: Chapter 6 and Conclusion

I'm skipping Ch 6. Skimmed and didn't find much to catch my interest. If my question was "What is our end goal for our students?" then this would be an important chapter to dig through. Not my question.

Anyway, he gives the most concise definition of his term "literary intellectual" in the Conclusion. For Dawson literary intellectuals are "writers who are critically aware of how literature circulates in social power relations, and who accept responsibility for their own work" (205).

He adds:

Since intellectuals within the post-Theory academy are concerned not only with the refinement of disciplinary knowledge, but with the deployment of this knowledge within public debate, students and teachers of Creative Writing who perform intellectual work as writers are positioned to contribute to the New Humanities by virtue of the fact that their work is geared towards an audience in the public sphere. (205)

The pedagogical reform Dawson calls for is related to this idea of the creative writer as an agent of social transformation, or at least as an active and aware participant in the political situation of his/her work. His revision of workshop strategy includes interventions that highlight the social and political nature of creative work.

If each student manuscript is not only afforded a remedial technical overhauling in the workshop, but is placed within a broader cultural or political context by the critical expertise of the teacher, then student writers will be given a greater understanding of how their creative work might relate to their essays in other classes, and how they might consider placing themselves as writers in society, as intellectuals who can potentially contribute to public debate via the medium of literature, rather than merely seeing potential publication as affirmation of their 'talent'. (208)

He recommends encouraging students to read work from countries where political repression and social unrest force authors into awareness of their responsibilities to the public sphere. He also recommends having students engage with critiques of the whole category of literature from a Cultural Studies perspective, although he offers no leads in that direction. Unfortunate, since I am not familiar with those critiques and could use a lead or two to help me along.

Dawson suggests a pedagogy that negotiates a balance between formalism and political engagement. This balance:

requires shifting the pedagogical focus of the workshop from narrowly formalist conceptions of craft to the social context of literature, but without diminishing the importance of craft as an intellectual skill, and without detracting from the purpose of improving students' writing. This means paying attention to the content of a literary work, as this is what connects it to the outside world, but without isolating content from form. What is required, then, is to demonstrate how content is realised in the formal construction of a text, and this means shifting from a formalist poetics to a sociological poetics. (208)

To this end he briefly employs Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and then offers a reading of a book of poems related to animal rights. Bakhtin's work is strong, the reading of these poems, less so, if only because the political features and social content of the poetry is so much on the surface that it provides no depth understanding of how all creative work employs language that is, by nature, politically loaded.

A few quotes worth pulling from his summary and use of Bakhtin:

The author is not a craftsman who employs an ideologically neutral and formalistically pure language to express a unified personal vision or to master the objective world. Instead, writers represent within the literary world a range of extra-literary languages which organise social relations. (209)

Adapting this insight [he's referring to heteroglossia] tothe critical practice of the workshp would mean considering how these 'voices' are transformed by their inclusion and manipulation within a text. It would mean tracing the dialogic connections being made between the text and the extra-literary discourses it mobilises, and thus studying how authorial voice // is positioned in relation to other social voices...A sociological poetics would thus require a recognition that aesthetic or craft-based decision of a writer are always the result (consciously or otherwise) of ideological or political choice: the choice to employ social languages and the ideologies they embody in certain ways, and hence the choice to position a literary work in relation to these languages, as an active intervention in the ideological work they perform. (210-211)

The author is always engaged in a dialogue with the belief systems or ideologemes which stratify a national language and give meaning to words by employing them in concrete social utterances. As a result, the work of literature is itself a concrete utterance within those discourses, existing on the same discursive plane as a contribution to their verbal-ideological life. An oppositional criticism within the workshop would draw attention to the ways in which the privileged cultural status afforded to literature regulates the nature of this dialogic exchange. (214)

There is a lot to reflect on here, and I think I may save my thoughts for another post. I find Dawson's pedagogical leanings inspiring, and I'm pretty sure I could make a decent paper out of expanding his comment on the "privileged cultural status" of literature and, I would add, "literary" language.

Leads:

Bakhtin, of course.

Oh, and Cultural Studies perspectives on literature. Although, I'm guessing a good Marxist would do instead. Terry Eagleton, then. Marxism and Literary Critism (1976). Or maybe his Intro to Theory. And Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism would be a good fit. Not sure these are what he means by "Cultural Studies" though. I'm thinking not, and will need to track something down more along the lines of what he's talking about.