Mayers chapters 1 and 2

Mayers, Tim. (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2005. Print.

I didn't dogear too many of the first 60-some pages. He's just laying the groundwork, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm not deep enough in the conversation yet to get all the nuances of what he's doing...

He spends some time defining the "institutional-conventional wisdom" of creative writing, placing more emphasis on the hyphenated adjective than the noun, which he may even mean ironically. Or cynically. Maybe he's not a fan of "wisdom."

He's particularly interested in positioning CW in terms of the institutions within English studies. Strikes me as important, but dry. I'm more interested in seeing what he eventually proposes as an antidote to "wisdom."

Anyway, here's his pitch:

Briefly summarized, this institutional-conventional wisdom holds that creativity or writing ability is fundamentally "interior" or "psychological" in nature and that it is thus the province only of special or gifted individuals and is fundamentally unteachable. What *is* teachable in creative writing...is "craft," which is understood in this context as a collection of skills or techniques that writers can explore or use to demonstrate their creativity. Those people who possess the right kind of creative talent, if they can learn to master craft, can produce "serious writing" or works of "literature" that are aesthetically distinguishable from other kinds of texts. (14)

In his second chapter, Mayers introduces his concept of "craft criticism," which would seem to arise from the "wisdom" mentioned above, since his explanation of conventional wisdom relies heavily on the idea of craft, although it strikes me that, by his definition, craft criticism could cover a much wider swath of writing than simply that :

Craft criticism...refers to critical prose written by self- or institutionally identified "creative writers"; in craft criticism, a concern with textual production takes precedence over any concern with textual interpretation. (34)

See what I mean? Any critical prose by a creative writer focusing on the act of writing qualifies. Even if it doesn't subscribe to the "wisdom" mentioned above. So I'm guessing whatever Mayers comes up with will count as craft criticism, too. And as it develops, I believe his idea of craft criticism includes works that challenge the institutional-conventional wisdom of CW, which makes his definitions a bit awkward. If wisdom is all about craft, and craft criticism challenges wisdom, then craft challenges craft, more or less, which doesn't really make any sense. At least not in the abstract.

Everybody cites Myers (Elephants Teach), and Mayers is no exception. He visits Myers reading of the relation between criticism and CW, which finds the two closely related in history. Both entered the Academy at the same time, replacing "philology" (what is that?). Further, most of the "critics" were also "poets" and criticism was informed by their own practice of writing.

Mayers suggests that Myers account almost conflates criticism and CW, and mistakenly so since criticism became "institutionalized as an almost exclusively interpretive enterprise" (42). Instead, Mayers draws upon David Richter's schematization of literary criticism to suggest that craft criticism should be more closely identified with what Richter calls "rhetorical" criticism. This resonates with something I was thinking, which is that the Chicago School, contemporaries of the New Critics, were actually producing work closer to contemporary CW work. Crane and Olson and (later) Booth, are Rhetoricians at work in the field of CW. I think any study of the relationship of New Criticism to early CW should not leave these Chicago guys out. I remember one paper called "seven types of clarity" written in response to the more famous seven ambiguities; as I recall, this article (and the other Chicago stuff) took exception to the New Critical "fallacies" in a way that would provide a useful corrective to the contemporary CW talk about "formalism." Mayers would be a useful source for this:

Despite the fact that many of the New Critics were poets, their primary concerns...were formal and not rhetorical. New Criticism rapidly became a way to teach students how to interpret poetry by searching for the poems' own internal structures and rules. Rather than becoming institutionalized as a focus on writing poetry in general, New Criticism became institutionalized as a focus on reading, interpreting, and appreciating particular kinds of poems. (43)

New Criticism, the very movement that helped bring creative writing into the university, also effectively worked to disenfranchise many creative writers from the act of criticism. (44)

Because "close reading" and formal appreciation become dominant, the conversation of English studies move away from interests in production of texts. Interpretation is the focus, and remains so even after the rise of Theory, which simply takes interpretation to its logical extreme.

Mayers then gives a number of examples of craft criticism. Most notable among these is Katherine Haake's book, which is already on my reading list.

And that's it for the first two chapters.



Leads:

Mayers nods to Wendy Bishop, Mary Ann Cain, and Patrick Bizzaro as folks who did the work of informing Creative Writing pedagogy with insights from Composition studies.

He's got three sources for Bishop, in addition to her "Colors of a Different Horse" deal.

"The Literary Text and the Writing Classroom." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 15.3 (1995): 435-54.

"Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition." College Composition and Communication 51.2 (1999): 9-31.

Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing. 2nd ed. Portland, ME: Calendar Islands Publishers, 1998.

I'm thinking the book is the way to go...and was what Mayers was referring to as her "pioneering work."

He says this one analyzes student work and "workshoping" with the tools previously only used in comp theory:

Cain, Mary Ann. Revisioning Writer's Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.

Bizzaro, Patrick gets a bunch of entries, but I think this is the one, and it looks like a *must read* for me:

Responding to Student Poems: Applications of Critical Theory. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Cites David Richter's The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends as a source of many "maps" of literature, similar to M.H. Abrams. I should check that out before I present my own map again.