Ritter & Vanderslice: Can it really be taught?

Ed. Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice. *Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy.* Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2007. Print.

Haake, Katherine. "Against Reading."

Haake presents a problem that reinforces Shelnutt's critique of CW status quo as taking power and effectively diminishing the quality of writing in America:

to the extent that we continue to proceed by presenting unproblematized literary models in our classrooms as a primary teaching strategy, we will work toward reinforcing already anachronistic twentieth century views of what counts as writing...Curiously, this remains the single sacrosanct element of our profession. Aren't we, after all, training our students to read us? It's not polite to say so, but if not them, who?...Students who emerge from such workshops...will have internalized some vague notion about what contemporary writing is supposed to look like, and in the best tradition of imitative pedagogies, will try to produce it. And this is precisely how we have earned our reputation for an MFA-homogenized // literature in what Patrick Bizzaro describes as a "...workshop-writing phenomenon [that] no doubt works vertically, where sameness is passed from teacher to student who, in turn, becomes a teacher who passes certain literary biases to yet another generation of students" (Bizzaro 305). (Haake 21)

Here's a sad outcome to an inspired assignment of "reading" the world:

I began to require that my students keep a "fact of the week" journal, utterly convinced that though many seemed dispassionate about, even uninterested in, the broader world, it would take little more than a glace to awaken their latent curiosities and vital sense of connection with [what] Bahktin has called the "open-ended present." But in the relative stability of post-earthquake, post-uprising L.A., my students were generally confounded by the assignment and had trouble finding even one fact in the whole world to command their attention and interest each week.

Today, that world is a vexed and altered one, and though it may not be the job of the creative writing teacher to tell the students how to think about that world, surely it should be to expect them to look at—to "read"—it. And as they do, they should ask hard questions about the role of writing in the particular world that turns out to be thiers, and how they would have their own work engage and move through it, defining their own intersection with history and what they would have their writing both *be* and *do* in it. (24)

That second paragraph is key. A great orientation for the CW workshop. Dovetails nicely into what I'm thinking of doing with literacy theory and CW.

LEADS: that bizzaro: "Research and Reflection in English Studies: The Special Case for Creative Writing." *College English* 66.2:294-309.

Cross, Michelle. "Writing in Public: Popular Pedagogies of Creative Writing."

Cross presents a typology of popular CW pedagogies. That is, CW pedagogy as it appears in public. There are four: Literary, Commercial, Holistic, Iconic. Literary focuses on craft.

Commercial pedagogy:

focuses on literary texts in the context of a market-driven public culture. It implicitly conceives of creative writing as a vocation and of the writer as a professional labourer engaging in economic activity in an industry, more so than pursuing a path of artistic or spiritual self-discovery. As such, the lessons therein may vary in their specific suggestions for the craft of writing—from codified genre conventions to loose principles of plot and character development—but are linked in their explicit recognition of the market as having a palpable presence in and influence on the writer's life and work. (69)

You'd think she was describing Marxist analysis, and she may well include such analysis in this category, but Cross is mostly referring to tomes like *Writer's Market* and *How to Write Short Stories That Sell* etc.

Here's where she brings it home:

But despite its apparent vulgarity, commercial creative writing pedagogy may deserve credit for its lack of illusions, having looked at and engaged with the current literary publishing business for what it is—a profit-oriented industry—and having made the most out of it all the same. The industry has not changed, but has only become more massively corporatized, and the commandment that "thou shalt not be in it for the money" has served publishers better than writers...Like the myth of the hardworking immigrant, the fatalistic idea that 'good' literature will transcend the fate of the starving artist and prevail over the market is an attitude that serves to further naturalize the market-driven nature of the industry, and potentially propels unsuspecting aspiring writers into creative writing programs that do not properly credential students for professional survival, let along success, after graduation. (70)

Holistic pedagogy is all about self-discovery and echoes what Myers said about CW in its earliest from in American junior high schools:

[It] focuses on engendering a writing experience that contributes to the discovery, development, and healing of the writer's spiritual and emotional *self*, first and foremost...it values process over product, writing over literature, and individual concerns over social concerns. (70)

Iconic pedagogy is essentially the "star" system in the public sphere. Name authors write books about how they write, etc.

LEADS:
Epstein, Jason. 2002. *Book Business: publishing past, present, and future.* New York, NY: Norton.
She quoted him in her commercial pedagogy section to good effect. Something about "mass merchandise for the mall" on 105 and celebrity of authors on 19.

Vandenberg, Peter. "*Lore* and *Discipline*"

So many good things in such a small space....

It is a sad fact that when we complain about "theory," we are almost always complaining about something else—nominalizations, bald professionalism, myopia, professional turf-grabs, arrogance, elitism, and so on. We are rarely complaining about *a particular set of provisional concepts, definitions and propositions that, by specifying relations among variables, functions to explain and predict phenomena.*

to do so is to engage in theory, to be a theorist, rather than to simply complain.

What irritates us—even those of us who write and profess "theory"—is someone else who doesn't seem to share our language or location attempting to govern our understanding of "our" concepts, definitions, and propositions. *As an institutionalized practice,* the production and circulation of theory in textual form functions to empower some and disempower others. It is not theory, then, that threatens, but a particular, institutionalized *version* of theory-as-practice. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak—rejecting "theory" when one means to reject the authority of a particular institutional practice—tends to deny creative writing and its practitioners critical tools and a self-reflexive ethos.

While there is much of interest in discussions about the appropriateness of theory in and for creative writing, when such discussion reifies scholarly debate and dismisses it derisively as "theory," creative writing defines itself in opposition to critical inquiry. (107)

A nice, succinct rebuttal to the anti-theory folk. Thanks, Vandenberg.

He's also got some great stuff about "postprocess theory" and how he expects that CW theory will catch up to it someday soon.

The term "postprocess"

comes not from a desire to abandon a commitment to the writing act over the finished rhetorical artifact; rather, it signifies that there is too much to consider to remain fixated on the individual writer's act of composing.

and here he is on the future of creative writing theory:

A more self-consciously critical discourse of creative writing will most certainly refuse to continue bracketing conventionally defined literary genres, instead pulling them into a theory of relation with other writing practices and decidedly *un*literary text types. It also seems likely that these relations will be understood to be as they are because the circumstances in which writing is produced have an inevitably local and material dimension. To talk of creative writing as the product and preoccupation of a generalized and dislocated "workshop" will no doubt seem to explain less and less about what mean by *writing*. As has been the case elsewhere in English studies, creative writing will no doubt be increasingly studied as a function of the places where it is learned as well as where it is deployed; we are sure to hear much about creative writing as a *situated practice*. Signifying as it does an expanded attention beyond the individual writer's cognitive process, postprocess theory will open creative writing to the notion of positionality. (108)

Again, a nice tie-in to literacy theory and its application to creative writing. Strikes me that another solid hour or so of class discussion would flow from assigning this essay along with Harris's. Anti-theory process guy vs. pro-theory postprocess guy.

He gives an interesting example, applying Anis Bawarshi's work on first-year comp to the CW workshop. By examining "the syllabus, the written assignments, the margin notes and formal written comments developed by students in response to their classmates' work, and the teacher's informal and formal assessment" the postprocess analysis of the workshop finds that "the student's poem—as a response to an assignment sheet—is not only a poem in the conventional sense of a literary artifact but also a reflection of intention and subjectivity *organized by* particular relations specified by the genre set" (109).

LEADS: should look this guy up and see if he's written anything lately that expands on his application of postprocess to CW.

Harper and Kroll: Creative Writing Studies

*Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy.* Ed Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD, 2008. Print.

Three useful articles here. Fraser for the value of post-structural theory. McLoughlin for a framing of the project. Hardy for a negative example of the application of the intentional fallacy to the workshop.

Fraser, Gregory. "A Translator's Tale."

Fraser considers himself a translator in the sense that he devotes himself "'translating' the discourses of critical theory into the art and discipline of Creative Writing" (152). Fraser is especially interested in translating post-structural and postmodern theory into CW practice. The primary value of this theory to CW students, according to Fraser, is that is saves them from "parochialism" and/or "provincial attitudes." Understanding sophisticated theory allows authors to write sophisticated creative work.

The value of understanding Foucault's work is that it leads to closer examinations of power relations:

Without a fine-tuned awareness of 'minute and everyday' expressions of power, as well as of larger authoritarian forces in culture (not to mention the continual commingling of the two), Creative Writing students may open their work to criticism of parochialism...[S]killful authorship demands a keen perception of authority in its innumerable forms—in big business and government, to local-level yet no-less-complex exchanges between parents and kids, to 'everyday' (and often seemingly power-neutral) interactions with friends, lovers, and perfect strangers...It is frequently this vision of power that leads students to subtler works of fiction, drama, and poetry. It helps them avoid the narrow view that simply ignores the play of power, and the similarly limited vision that believes power to be located solely in institutions divorced, form, and standing above, the 'everyday'. (157)

Postmodern notions of the de-centering of discourse and the subject help "emerging writers de-essentialize their characters and destabilize formulaic plots" (160).

Lacan for characters:

I find that the Lacanian notion of deferred desire can help students create characters whose motivations are less predictable, more open to surprise. (160)

And Lacan for poetry:

Lacanian theories about selfhood have a special force, as well, for student poets. At the onset, many students who wish to write poems proceed from myths of wholeness about the self Students often write poems to voice what they take to be the essence of an inner being. They seek // to capture some final, genuine truth about an allegedly unique emotion or experience. And these underlying assumptions often produce texts that reach for effect...Lacanian theory can help students recognize not so much the fragmentation of an ultimately unified albeit imperiled self (a modernist conception), but the cultural/linguistic manufacture of the very idea of selfhood (a more postmodern assertion). Such a perspective gives students a different kind of freedom to adopt masks and to explore self-contradictions as generative rather than logically fallacious. Lacan can't help students completely shed the dominant fictions of culture (none of us can do that), but his thinking can encourage students to recognize and tamper with these assumptions in unexpected, artistically vitalizing ways. (160-1)

And Lacan for the creative process:

Students may in fact become more willing, after a little training in Lacanian theory, to let language (rather than a sense of stable selfhood) guide the poetic process. They may allow language to suggest unstable constructions of selfhood, flickers of desire, suggestions of unconscious strings of motivation. This can lead to stronger poems. (161)

Derrida has some value, too:

Derrida's thought can 'free' them [students] from the 'tyranny of the central idea.' Such freedom frequently leads to greater flexibility in characterization, plot development, and language use. By not beginning with a main theme or idea, students avoid working predictably down the page. (162)

I'm not as convinced by this argument. I've yet to see a constructive application of Deconstruction that works. And how could such a thing work? Derrida's thought is liberating for some, since it allows for the undoing of established categories, etc... But I'm not sold on the idea that reading "Structure, Sign, and Play" will allow students to write less predictably, or that whatever they'll come up with instead will be preferable.

McLoughlin, Nigel. "Creating an Integrated Model for Teaching Creative Writing: One Approach."

McLoughlin speaks of "writerly criticism":

At the center I write. Everything stems from that. If I didn't write, I would not be interested in writerly criticism, because to write means one must also criticise in a writerly fashion. Writerly criticism is // different from literary criticism. There is a difference of viewpoint. Literary criticism is concerned largely from the reader's viewpoint. What impact the text has on the reader, how different readers may read a text. While writerly criticism is concerned with that also, it is only part of the story, it is only ever a means to an end. A writer will examine a text critically in order to look closely at the effects it might have on the reader, and at different ways the text may be read, but the motivation is different. The writer may want to add an ambiguity or remove one; a writer may wish to engender a specific effect or set of effects on the reader. Either way, writerly critics are concerned with making the text 'better'. They tend to start from the premise that, this would work better if... (88-89, his ellipsis)

McLoughlin feels that teaching creative writing is, to some extent, teaching students the art and practice of writerly criticism. It allows them to practice such criticism on their own texts. However, he does not feel that they are best taught by workshoping their own texts:

It quickly became apparent that exemplars of good and bad writing worked much better as a way of demonstrating, in practical terms, particularly fine writing or cliche and redundancy etc. in a less emotionally charged atmosphere. It enabled students to criticise and edit the writing of others and by extension their own writing, through using worked examples from other writers that pointed out certain features that students could recognise in their own work or try and adapt to their own uses. (89)

Here's how to pass writerly criticism on to students:

Teaching students to be critical requires balance between bringing out ideas they may have about how a text is working (or not working) and whether the text is good of its type. That // means also teaching them that just because they don't 'like' a text, it does not mean that it is not working, or that there is nothing they can learn from it as a writer. In order to teach this, as great a variety of texts as possible are introduced and the students are asked to interrogate the text from several viewpoints: Does the text work? How does it work? Could it be improved and if so how? What are the constituencies out of which the text is written? What can the student learn from the text as writer?

Later, he expands slightly on these last questions:

How does the author achieve his/her effects? What tropes do they use? What can I learn from these texts as a writer? (92)

The rest of his essay is taken up with the elements that must be taught and the sequence in which they are best taught. It's a good essay and a fine prescription for CW. Strikes me that this along with Shelnutt's article would make for a healthy class discussion, since she provides the best critique yet of CW status quo, and he provides an solid alternative model.

LEAD:
He cites Kolb's model of the writing cycle from Jarvis, P. (2004) *Adult Education & Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice*. London: Routledge Falmer.

Hardy, Nat. "Gonzo-Formalism: A Creative Writing Meta-Pedagogy for Non-Traditional Students"

I was hoping for more from this guy, but (as far as I could tell) he was promoting the traditional workshop in grandiose terms.

Most importantly to me, he exposes his unexamined assumption that the author of a text should be silent while the class critiques his/her work:

On a symbolic level, the workshop...embodies the 'death of the author' notion, because the monological author must restrain any response to criticism until the critical mass has concluded its interpretive, or poly- // phonic, review. For any author, donning the scold's bridle for the duration of workshop dialect is the most difficult, nay emasculating, part of workshop. Verbal castration sounds excruciating, and, for the silenced writer, it is as if he or she must quietly endure a discriminating panel of critics who cast literary judgments on the author's work...Once critical discussion of the creative work has concluded, the author can address his or her live audience to clarify ambiguities, ask questions or, in some cases, beg forgiveness. (103-104)

First of all, it's not possible to comment on this without first addressing Hardy's sexism. How can "any author" feel that something is "emasculating"? Has he ever felt de-feminated? Or, better yet, how can "he or she" endure "verbal castration?" Do his female students have their balls cut off by words? Or is that that all words have testes, and the workshop removes these, neutering each author's language?

In any case, this strikes me as really bad practice and leads to much wasted class time. Gonzo-formalist wasted class time, I guess. Authors are left on their own to measure the distance between intention and effect, rather than the whole class working intentionally and conscientiously on this project together. I guess "Gonzo" is his justification for all the weird, wasteful turns that class discussion can take when it is not directed toward productive criticism of the text. Radical.

Myers: Elephant Teach

Myers, D.G. *The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880*. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. Print.

Let me see if I can nutshell the history: Creative writing as a university subject came into being at about the time of the decline of philology and the rise of criticism. Creative writing instruction before "creative writing" proper consisted of "how to" handbooks and courses in writing (mostly the short story and mostly by correspondence) that emphasized formulas for commercial success. Creative writing proper began in a middle school and spread in the K-12 public school system as a part of the progressive movement in education. This CW was characterized by a lack of concern about the quality of prose/poetry produced and, instead, a focus on the development of creative expression in students. CW at the university level began when Norman Foerster took over the School of Letters at the University of Iowa. He opposed the progressive/expressive model of creative writing and felt that creativity and criticism ought to be taught in conjunction for a more complete understanding of literature. Since then, creative writing has shifted its emphasis from teaching literature to creating professional writers. Then, they taught writing as a means to another end. Now, we teach it as a distinct, even isolated, branch of English studies. The "elephant machine" is in full swing.

Seems to me there are branches of progressive and critical still in practice. The progressives still have K-12, more or less, as is evidenced by the latest CTA magazine. (I'll have to dig that up) And I had an undergrad workshop that was more or less a progressive deal. Wandor and others complain of this "therapeutic" tendency in the contemporary workshop. And there are some who advocate for CW as an education in "reading."

Here are the quotes I pulled, which more or less flesh out the history outlined.

CW as distinct from lit studies and rhet/comp:

Creative writing...has been an effort to treat writing as an end in itself. As such it has acted with hostility toward two different conceptions of literature and writing, which for convenience might be labeled the scholarly and the socially practical. On one side are those for whom literature is primarily a genre of knowledge...On the other side are those for whom literature or writing is a social practices that either serves the dominant powers or the forces of opposition...The one side has been content merely to *understand* literature, the other merely to *use* it. (8)

Historically, creative writing has beckoned a third way...They [the writers who taught writing] wished to substitute an approach that was grounded (in the words of their allies) on a practical experience of writing. they sought to impart the *understanding* of literature through a *use* of it...Creative writing was originally conceived as a means of teaching literature from the inside, as familiar experience, rather than // from the outside, as exotic phenomenon. It was intended to be an elephant's view of zoology. (8-9)

That's a nice reversal of the "elephants teach" deal. Basically accepting but also affirming the value of that premise. He uses the term "constructivist" to define CW.

Hughes Mearns is the dude who brought creative writing to education as a part of the progressive education movement. He wrote the books *Creative Youth* (1925) and *Creative Power* (1929), both of which might be worth looking up.

Mearns begins the whole expressive take on CW.

For Mearns:

Creativity was not exactly the same thing as productivity. It involved a shift from *product* to *process*. And in literary terms, this mean the poem carried little weight next to poem-producing. "[F]rankly, we do not care much about the product itself," Mearns said; "our interest goes out to the value in growth of personality that comes from genuine self-expression."...Mearns's view of poetry: it was continuous activity. The poem as something *made* or *said*, as something thta has finality, was foreign to him/ and thus to his conception of creative writing, too. Even the term *creative writing* implies something in progress, imperfect, not yet complete. (118)

Mearns's approach is allied with what Myers calls "creativism" which had to answer to critics:

The message of 1920s creativism was that the conditions for cultural renewal were political and educational: first creative ability had to be democratized, then education had to find to set it free. Left unanswered, though, were two questions. To create anything at all (including a new culture) did it suffice merely to liberate creative talent? and even if it did—even if creative talent were just as democratically distributed as creativists said—did not a culture also depend upon undemocratic distinctions between greater and lesser creative achievements? Wasn't *criticism*—not helpful criticism, not communal criticism, but unsparingly evaluative criticism—also necessary?...By shifting attention from the aesthetic object to the aesthetic experiences, creativisim tried to sidestep this problem. (120)

I like the idea of the democratization of creativity. That's huge. And the expressive approach strikes me as totally appropriate in K-12. Less appropriate at the college level.

[Mearns's Creative writing] was a course in personal development by means of self-expression for its own sake, not for the sake of demonstrating mastery of concepts in English language and literature...the business of making professional poets—something with which Hughes Mearns had never had the least interest—was left to take care of itself. (121)

When CW comes to the university, it begins in Iowa under Norman Foerster, who brings criticism into the mix. Foerster wrote a manifesto for the study of letters: *The American Scholar*, in which he laid out his plan for the University of Iowa, which included an emphasis on creative work:

He was clear about his objective: "We must set about restoring the traditional alliance of scholarship and criticism, the divorce of which has worked injury to both and played havoc with education." The time was ripe for a restoration: "the age of philology and minute historical research," he declared, "is drawing to a close." An age of criticism was dawning. And creative writing (as one of his assistant's phrased it) would be criticism's natural ally. (125)

Myers provides some helpful nuance on the new criticism:

Originally the name [new criticism] referred not to any special method of criticism but to the academic condition of the subject prior to 1941. The emphasis was not upon *new* but upon *criticism*. What was new was the argument that criticism was the best means for studying literature, not the kind of criticism itself. (129)

[The new critic's] conception of autonomy—to say nothing of their special method—had been badly misinterpreted. It was set forth in the Letter to the Teacher attached to *Understanding Poetry*: "thought one may consider a poem as an instance of historical and ethical documentation," Brooks and Warren said, "the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object of study." *If literature is to be studied as literature*: right there was the major premise of the new criticism. The blunder of most commentators has been to treat this as the minor premise, assuming the new critics set to work by stipulating that literature is virginally isolated from the social and historical context in which it is created.
Literature was not so much *defined* in this way as *studied* in this way. The new criticism was first of all a pedagogy. (130)

In other words, if you study a poem historically, you study it *as history*. If you study it biographically, you study it *as biography*. If you study it in terms of its effects, I suppose you study it *as psychology* or something to that effect. Etc. If you study the poem in terms of its poetry, you study it as such.

The interrelated nature of creativity and criticism:

the new criticism was distinguished by its confidence in the identity of criticism and literary creation...[They] argued that criticism must be grounded upon a practical experience of writing. This was perhaps the central doctrine of the new constructivist approach to literature. (131)

To write a poem, on their understanding, was to decide critically among the many creative directions it might take; to read it was to reenact those decisions. And to write criticism, then, was to duplicate the poet's experience—in a different medium. (132)

Criticism and creative writing went hand in hand at the Iowa School of Letters. As Foerster explained in his inaugural address, literature would be studied there from both the creative and critical points of view. Approaching it creatively means "[w]e are to study it from the inside, we are to see it, so far as possible, with the eyes of the creative artist." The ultimate aim, as he had put it in *The American Scholar*, was "to assist in an inner comprehension of art." (133)

A long quote here, Myers's paraphrase of what sounds like a valuable, unpublished essay by Foerster. Foerster argues for a middle ground on the "can it be taught?" issue, and he rails against the solipsism of "expression":

Foerster did not accept the essentialist dogma that writing could not be taught, though he also rejected the practical vocational alternative to it. In an unpublished lecture on "The Education of a Writer" delivered after he had left Iowa, he identified two popular fallacies: (1) "That a writer can be trained—that if he is promising, and take enough courses in various types of writing, he will be started on his career and thereafter advance by a natural process of growth"; and (2) "that formal education has *nothing* to offer the writer, that he develops from within as he grows in experience of actual life, especially life in the raw." Although seemingly antagonistic, the two ideas were really two sides of the same sentimental naturalism. They merely expressed an unwillingness to undertake the responsibility of educating writers. Foerster sought a mean between these two extremes: "I would have the writer go to college," he declared, "but I would not have him become what we call an 'academic.'"

Writers plainly needed a college education, but what they plainly did *not* need was undisciplined practice in creative self-expression. "Expression is a type of solipsism," Foester scolded, "based on the view that the self can known and depict only its own states." And the literary counterpart to the philosophical fallacy of solipsism was this: "While representing a private perception or experience, [the self] communicates doubtfully at best, unless the artist in some way explains." This was why he looked to bind creative writing tightly to the activity of criticism...in order to come truly into possession of creative power, he was convinced, a writer must ally his or her "precious idiocracy" [Whitman's term] to a discipline of ideas—that is, to a critical power. (135)

After Foerster, CW grows and spreads and stays "constructivist".

[As it grew] creative writing remained a discipline of criticism, but the criticism was neither "know-how" nor an absorption in technical detail; perhaps even "vocationalism" is too hidebound. Creative writing was the knowledge of how literary texts are made, how they work; it was a discipline of constructive knowledge. (159)

Morton and Zavarzadeh

Morton, Donald and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh. "The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop." Cultural Critique, No. 11 (Winter, 1988-1989), pp. 155-173

M&Z present a Marxist critique of the realist fiction workshop. My feelings about their work are similar to my feelings about Marxist critique in general: I appreciate their work in opening up the political dimensions of the workshop for examination, and when they make clear their own agenda, I lose interest.

They draw from another Marxist to show that realism isn't just an aesthetic category, but is an ideology that reinforces patriarchal Capitalism by affirming for the reader the status quo. They feel that realism has this effect as its "political agenda." Odd to think of an abstract category as in and of itself motivated to support anything at all outside of itself.

They begin by listing some of the assumptions of the workshop that have come under attack by postmodern critical theory:

the idea of the free "subject," the integrity of "experience," the sharp separation of "reading" from "writing," the individual "voice," the "authority" of the author, uniqueness of "style," the obedience of the reader, "originality," and "intuition." (155)

They certainly could have demonstrated all of these points without the Marxist slant, but the political agenda is important to these authors:

The fiction workshop is not a "neutral" place where insights are developed, ideas/advice freely exchanged, and skills honed. It is a site of ideology: a place in which a particular view of reading/writing texts is put forth and through this view support is given to the dominant social order. By regarding writing as "craft" and proposing realism as the mode of writing, the fiction workshop in collaboration with humanist critics fulfills its ideological role in the dominant academy by preserving the subject as "independent" and "free."...a subject who perceives herself as self-constituted and free so...can then "freely" collaborate with the existing social system, a collaboration that assures the continuation of patriarchal capitalism (161)

So by excluding the examination of cultural and historical forces, the workshop preserves these forces in their present form.

Their critique of the realist workshop's view of creativity:

"Creativity," in other words, is the ability to transcend the political, the economic, and in short the "material" conditions of writing (transcend the "order external to" oneself) as a social person and arrive at a transdiscursive space. It is in this unbounded space, free of all political, social, economic, and linguistic constraints, that the creative person is able to penetrate the opacities of culture and experience reality in its absolute plenitude. (163)

The emphasis on "voice" and "finding" one's unique, singular, personal voice reinforces the political agenda of the independent subject:

Far from being "singular," the voice is in fact a "construct"-a politically needed cultural product produced // by professionals of ideology such as...writers who direct fiction workshops across the country. The commodification of"voice" and of individuality in the fiction workshop is in fact the major political role played by creative writing programs (165-166)

On character:

Character (the model for the free subject) is depicted as a unitary and coherent individual who is always unique and, in his most authentic mode, solitary-like an entrepreneur, he works all by himself. Through individual characters realistically portrayed, the reader discovers his own subjectivity. The valorization of character in the fiction workshop, in other words, is part of its cultural politics in legitimizing the ruling values of capitalism. (167)

They don't like causality, either. Character, realism and causality are forces of patriarchal Capitalism. Seems kind of arbitrary. What if a-causal, non-realistic fiction without characters sold like hot-cakes? Wouldn't that make "experimental" fiction an ideological apparatus of the state? And what of realist fiction published in communist and/or socialist nations? Is that capitalism creeping in? Or simply a reinforcement of their own status quo, making realism exactly the neutral aesthetic M&Z don't want it to be.

Here's what they have to say about Nadine Gordimer, of all people:

Her texts work to legitimate a reformist program by offering a local critique of apartheid and thus help to forestall a radical reorganization of social arrangements in South Africa. In this respect, she is actually undertaking the same ideological program being undertaken by many white South African investment bankers and other capitalists against the wishes of the
present government. (171)

Which exposes the problem with Marxist criticism. It's all very smart and interesting and then eventually reveals that nothing short of full Marxist propaganda will ever be good enough. If you're not advocating the overthrow of the state and the installation of worker control over the means of production, you're just a puppet of capitalist ideology no matter how socially progressive your message.

And, of course, these guys are hypocrites. They publish marketable prose that in no way upsets the status quo. For all their talk of radical theory, M&Z have adjusted quite well to the comforts of the academy and the security of tenure (or the tenure process). In fact, publications like this are little more than efforts at tenure, since Marxist critique is a salable good in the academic marketplace. Journals are likely to publish, publications are likely to please tenure committees, and tenure makes for happy "Marxists", securely positioned in the Capitalist regime, their work appropriated by an intelligentsia with no interest in large-scale social reform.

Here's what they think the workshop should be doing:

Instead of "resisting" theory in the name of the free subject, the fiction workshop should be the pedagogical space in which the processes of signification in texts of culture are to be examined and the construction of what is represented as "reality" is made intelligible. By undertaking such an inquiry and political critique, rather than adopting the traditional stance of the humanist ideologies and "resisting" theory, the radical fiction workshop will propose theory as resistance to all semiotic constructs of culture which are offered as "natural," "eternal," and "unchangeable" and will discover under their seeming eternity the historical interests of the dominant social class and its texts. (173)

So essentially, they want to do to student texts what they did to Gordimer: "Can't you see, dear student, that you are merely a puppet of patriarchal Capitalism?" They want to forward their own ideology in the classroom, and their own postmodern aesthetic which they mistakenly feel best expresses their ideology. (*Gravity's Rainbow* was a bestseller, right? As was *Underworld*.) There is no indication from M&Z about how Marxism will make students better writers, but then, making students better writers is not the goal of these authors. They are not interested in helping students learn to write, they are interested in posing as radical social critics in order to forward their careers in the academy. Just like the rest of us.

Anyway, they do provide a valuable service in opening a conversation about the politics and culture of the workshop. They point out all the right problems, even if their solution lacks integrity.

LEADS:
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 66.

Derrida *On Grammatology*

Marjorie Perloff, " 'Homeward Ho!': Silicon Valley Pushkin," American Poetry Review (November-December 1986): 45

Moxley: CW in America

Just picked a few articles that looked the most useful.

Valerie Miner "The Book in the World"

Really interesting stuff here. She describes what sounds like a vital class, one that should be required rather than labeled "experimental." Students take internships and examine the social realities of publishing and sales of books. "Social issues in publishing" is the name of the course.

Her list of theoretical issues reads like a recipe for a chapter of my thesis:

The theoretical issues include: literacy in the United States; regional identity in publishing; the economics of conglomerate houses and independent firms; the role of the critic in society, the treatment of under-represented cultures in publishing, First Amendment rights and responsibilities. (228)

Or close, anyway. She found the connection between literacy and CW, and its "social issues" related to publishing creative work. Smart.

Here's her defense of the course against those who feel that students should be shielded from the social and economic realities of publishing:

I'm not teaching people to compromise their art to suit the bestseller list or the elite list of celebrated literary houses. Quite the opposite, I'm saying that writers need to know about the world around them to understand how to protect the integrity of their work. // As artists, it's crucial to understand how we function as social agents...it is essential to understand what does and doesn't get published and why...By studying the *context* of the making of literature we can preserve good writers from early discouragement...the more we understand how our work is treated in the world, the more likely we are to survive and succeed as writers. (233-234)

And here's her take on one important aspect of the racial inequity involved in publishing:

[An] American legend worth examining is the notion that "any good book eventually gets published." If we live in a country where—as popular myth would have it—anyone can grow up to be president, certainly anyone can be a writer. The truth is that in either case you may succeed more readily on the basis of race, gender, social or geographic status. (234)

I agree on both points, President Obama's incumbency notwithstanding.

A few LEADS, and other books I found while on Amazon:

editors on editing

book publishing industry 2nd ed

Books: the culture and commerce of publishing


Eve Shelnutt "Notes from a Cell: Creative Writing Programs in Isolation"

Shelnutt's article offers a powerful critique of CW programs and the state of literature in America. I'll let her do most of the talking:

The unsettling fact is that in America the majority of new "serious" imaginative writing is being produced by writers trained in M.F.A. programs staffed by teachers who themselves are products of M.F.A. programs.
The intellectual climate in these programs ceases to be of provincial concern when publishers, the reading public, and alumni of M.F.A. programs are congruent...Moreover, when so many aspiring writers and publishing teachers are gathered under the umbrella organization of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), which concerns itself, among other things, with developing connections with publishers, it becomes difficult to discern how much the publishing industry is influenced by writing spawned in M.F.A. programs (4)

I remember at Alice James books that decisions on the poetry contest (the only way they published) were made by the board, and that the board was made up primarily of graduates of Iowa City. While I was there, we published three or four poets, all of them fellow alumni. I don't think this was intentional, or the workings of a good-old-boy network. Rather, Iowa City produces a particular aesthetic, valued and promulgated by its graduates. When the board read from the submissions, they naturally gravitated toward their own. That said, these were not blind readings, so a the more cynical explanation could still be true. Either way, this to some extent verifies Shelnutt's complaint.

Shelnutt connects the proliferation of literary journals with the rise of MFA programs and the new availability of federal and state money for the arts. Graduates and teachers needed places to publish, and CW departments needed a public face that would legitimize their "contribution" to letters, so the journals filled these needs. Because they are motivated by these needs rather than a desire to find and encourage the best available writing, these journals are not, according to Shelnutt, providing much of a service to contemporary literature. And small university presses, since they base their decisions to some degree on an author's track record with the lit journals, these presses are not exactly a beacon of hope, either. Intellectual fiction, and the writer as a public intellectual, are not supported by this state of affairs.

the relevant questions seem to me to be, *what* are we teaching students who come to us wanting to learn how to write fiction, poetry, and nonfiction? And how does what we teach or fail to teach affect contemporary literature? (8)

The assumption is that the AWP, or the collective CW programs, exercise a great deal of influence over the direction of American lit. If it's all McPoetry or whatever, then that's bad news.

I have come to believe that M.F.A. students are largely separated from the broader intellectual life of the university, and...I see this separation as augmenting publishers' economic moves away from quality literature (9)

Interesting how she ties the MFA to publishing and economic factors...

Then there's this:

There are no theorists of the teaching of creative writing equal to the theorists in literature and composition. (15)

If that isn't a call to arms, I don't know what is.

Important to address are "considerations of a writer's attitude to language and form as carriers *in themselves* of political and social assumptions as well as methods by which subtle social and political affects are or can be expressed in imaginative writing. (20)

In defense of theory:

Knowing of and thinking about contemporary theories of criticism does not mean an M.F.A. student must embrace the theories...The M.F.A. student may want to consider new ways of thinking about literature when encountering new literary works. (21)

LEADS

Looks like we gots to get Gass's article. Solid critique of the MFA.


Moxley's article "Tearing Down the Walls: Engaging the Imagination"

Moxley surveys comp theory, like Bishop, and is most helpful for his leads

He suggests Erika Lindermann *A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers* OUP 1987 for a survey of prewriting strategies.

This guy did a really interesting experiment on productivity under constraint:
Boice, Robert. "The Neglected Third Factor in Writing: Productivity." *College Composition and Communication* 36: 472-80.

these two sources suggest that teachers comment on student writing based on a student's intentions and purpose:
Knoblauch, C. H., and Lil Brannon. "Teacher Commentary on Student Writing: The State of the Art." *Freshman English News* 10: 1-4.
Sommers, Nancy. "Responding to Student Writing." CCC 33:1-3, 7.

He make this weird claim:

Many creative writers reject all the have read when they sit down to write. Instead of mimicking work they admire, creative writers turn their focus inward toward the depths of inner speech...Many creative writers look inside, assessing what they've internalized, as opposed to mimicking what they admire (37)

Then he quotes Salinger...or one of Salinger's narrators to this effect:

Ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself (38)

This may reflect what many writers report of their process, and so, for those writers, it may be appropriate to leave well enough alone. However, Moxley proposes that writers are actually doing what they thing they are doing, which is rather impossible. No one can "reject all they have read" nor is there any "inner speech" somehow essentially separate from public speech. The writer can't really originate text out of thin air; writer's draw on what they know, what they have read. They may do something new, but only new in relation to and in conversation with what has come before. Moxley needed more emphasis on the "internalized" and less emphasis on the "reject".

As for Buddy Glass, he is not claiming that audience does not matter, but merely that he, himself is also a reader and is therefore his own best chance of understanding what readers think like, what they like, what they want from a work of fiction. "You were a *reader*" he says "long before you were a writer."

Moxley goes on:

Contrary to the rhetorical paradigm, writers like Aldous Huxley don't bother with the thoughts of external audiences when they're writing: "I've never made a point of writing for any particular person or audience; I've simply tried to do the best job I could and let it go at that." (38)

But what is a "good job" for Huxley? How does he know when he's done one? Surely he can't think his standards for good writing are wholly original, private, originating in himself. A "good job" of writing is always a good job of saying something in a way that achieves a desired effect for a particular audience, even when that audience is not consciously addressed and the writer never bothers to investigate his/her concept of "reader."

Janet Emig comes up again:
"Writing as a mode of learning" CCC 1977 28: 122-28

Weis brings brain research from the 80s into her work:
Weis, Monica R. "Current Brain Research and the Composing Process" In *The Writer's Mind: Writing as a Mode of Thinking,* edited by Janice Hays, Phylis Roth, Jon Ramsey, Robert Foulke, 25-34. Urbana: NCTE, 1983.

*The Courage to Create* by Rollo May looks really good, and that in conjunction with *The Mirror and the Lamp* would make for the beginnings of a decent paper on creativity.

Selzer Jack, "Exploring options in Composing." CCC 35 1984: 276-84

Why do I feel like I'm stuck in the 80s???

Murray, Donald. "Teach Writing as a Process not a Product." In *Learning by TEaching* Upper Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1982, 14-39.

Because I AM stuck in the 80s. Cue the Wham!


Finally, a quote from Moxley's intro, which summarizes the content of the collection:

Taken as a whole, these authors and editors make the following recommendations: (1) student writers must be readers—a background in literature and criticism enables student writers to identify and produce creative work, (2) academic training in writing must be rigorous and diverse; (3) student writers must have an understanding of the composing process and a knowledge of a variety of composing strategies; and (4) student writers must master the fundamentals of craft. (xvi)

LAST LEAD:
To catch me up on process pedagogy, Lad Tobin's article in this book might help. In fact, the whole book should offer a nice overview of comp pedagogy and what it might have to teach CW. Maybe it ends in the 80s, maybe there's more to read. either way, Tobin will fill me in.

Harper: Teaching Creative Writing

*Teaching Creative Writing.* Ed. Graeme Harper. London: Continuum, 2006.

Mostly this book is broken down by genre. Everything from radio to hypertext. There are a few pertinent essays in the back.

Rob Pope gives a succinct intro to his "Textual Intervention" deal in his essay called "Critical-Creative Rewriting":

Of course, all mature courses in Creative Writing require some evidence of 'process', too. But unless this is supported by a work-log and a full record of research and reading as well as reflection (as in a comprehensive portfolio), the critical element is often perfunctory: a dutiful bolt-on attached after the event. (130)

It strikes me, though, that most if not all criticism happens "after the event." For writers and readers both. Northrop Frye distinguished between pre-critical and critical experience of a work by stating that the first was the only type of experience that could take place while reading (or viewing, as with a play) since the whole was not yet in view and could therefore not be judged.

Writing can be a pre-critical experience, as when a work is developing by "inspiration" or "intuition" or whathaveyou. It can also be a critical experience--that is *the writing itself* can be a critical experience--as when one looks at what one has written and must make decisions about what to change or leave alone and why. So all writing, at least all rewriting is critical at some level. I suppose some folks rewrite more by "feel" and would call their revisions "inspirations" or "inspirational." Even so, they must, even if unconsciously, filter their work according to some standards of what makes a good piece of writing, or how a given piece will best suit its purpose.

Pope seems to feel this way too, since he says that "writing is not just 'creative' but...there is always a 'critical' dimension to it too (we weight the words we choose)" (131).

Maybe his "bolt-on" comment was meant simply as a take-down of workshop approaches that don't feature the critical as a part of the creative process and not as a take-down of the creative process itself. That makes more sense.

His description of the process he proposes:

We always start with a text that already exists, preferably in more than one version, and then we rewrite it: adapt it, critique it, intervene in it. (131)

*Textual intervention* is the more or less deliberate challenging and changing of a text so as to put it off balance: to point it in a fresh direction or develop it in an alternate dimension—to de- and re-centere, de- and re-construct it. This might involve anything from tinkering with a few words to full-scale textual transformation. (132)

He gives *Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead* and *Wide Sargasso Sea* as examples of the latter and "To buy or not to buy" as an example of the former.

The rest of his essay gets more specific about how to create textual intervention-based exercises. It's not a bad approach. Certainly a nice twist on the "imitation" exercise. It takes one aspect of the creative writing process and puts it in a new context. "Textual intervention" is what we all do to our own texts every time we write, calling it "revision." Pope's exercise allows students to make the revision process explicit and creative and playful by turning it loose on someone else's stuff. At some point, I think it would be important to make it explicit that this playful revisioning is what it is: an exercise that allows writers to bring a sense of play and creativity to the revision of their own work.

Harper's own essay "Research in Creative Writing" is a bit trying but gets at some good material.

His answer to the question "What is valid academic work for CW?" is, more or less, that writing is research. I'm oversimplifying things, but not so much. It would be better to say that, for Harper, research or critical work of some kind is always a part of the writing process:

The creative writer engages in, and constructs alongside their creative practice, an active critical understanding of a specific kind. This critical understanding is in part based on a development of a craft, a set of skills that are practical, applied, pragmatic; the creative writer learns what works, and aims to employ this learning...The creative writer's critical understanding is also based on a sense of genre, form and convention. (161)

This leads into his "responsive critical understanding" idea, which I've read about in other work by Harper elsewhere:

The creative writer researches their sense of critical understanding, 'in process', whether prior, during or after the production of a single work, and most directly in relation to immediate or future work, planned or as yet unplanned...This can be called *responsive critical understanding*, and it is both the purpose and the product of creative writing research. (162)

CW research exists for the purpose of enhancing whatever part of the writing process is necessarily critical.

He recommends research into what he calls the "art" and the "cultures" of creative writing. By art, he means "that all writers have a concern with words, their meaning, their arrangment, and their impact on their audience...the writer seeks additional knowledge of the nature of words, and of their use" (163). By "cultures" Harper refers to the "interaction between...the individual writer and her or his environment." His explanation of how this research takes place is helpful:

'What if?' is the question that drives the process of creative writing...'What if this was my life?' 'What if my daily routine took this turn?' 'What if this disaster had befallen me?'...The creative writer inserts themselves [sic] into the inter- // pretative position; empathetically, providing a way for the reader to follow through a speculation, effectively alongside the writer themselves [sic]. (164)

All his what ifs involve his own person, rather than a character separate from himself. And his list may be more specific to fiction writers than poets perhaps. But the idea that a writer is exploring material through a creative response is interesting. It means the creative project *is* a critical project, and defends the intellectual process of creative writing as equal (at least in merit) to other academic work.

Another reason this last quote is helpful is that it complicates the distinction between what I've been thinking about as the "creative" side and the "critical" side of the writing process. The "creative" side has a critical element to it, or it can. It can represent a critical imaginative engagement with the world.

LEADS:

I read in another article that Wendy Bishop has a more recent book on the writing process.
On Writing: A Process Reader.
There's a 2008 edition out. Could have some good leads on current stuff on the writing process.

the thinking thus far

My reading thus far is helping me reevaluate where I stand on this project. Rethinking what I want to do, as always.

Seems that "creative writing theory" is part of a larger category: "creative writing studies."

The basic question of creative writing studies is this: "What sorts of academic work are appropriate to this discipline?" It's a question that is of much concern in the present conversation, and theory is one possible answer.

But CW theory is new. So it's unsure how to go about theorizing. Should it draw on comp theory? Or literary theory? Or chart its own course? There are voices representing each of these directions. Seems to me CW theory can, and should, do all of these. It would be silly not to draw on comp theory, since they've been asking the relevant questions for some time now. But do we start over and do "process" like they did 30 or 40 years ago? Or do we catch up and do the sort of identity-politics influenced social critique stuff? Or both? Probably both. And it would be silly not to draw on literary theory, even if it is "interpretive" instead of "productive," since lit theory has been asking relevant questions for a long, long time. But what to take from lit theory? Only formalism? Post-structuralism, too? Both again? And it seems important that we chart our own course, too, since we are productive rather than interpretive, and there must be some important distinctions between us and comp folk...or are there? We can at least bring an extra emphasis on creativity and investigation questions of inspiration, etc.

So in short, CW theory has got way too much to do. It has to draw on two existing academic traditions and find its own voice and interests. This is a lot to accomplish all at once.

And more than I can handle in a semester. Or even in a Masters Thesis...

Things have been broadening, and now I need to narrow them down. I want to do something with comp theory, with literacy, with formalism and with post-structuralism, but not all this semester. My final project will need an extensive literature review, so maybe that's what I'm working on this semester. This is my chance to read all this stuff, so... I guess that's it. A big lit review, and if I get a chance, I'll address New Criticism and why it doesn't work for the workshop, and then if I really have loads of extra time, I'll do the other formalisms and why some of them might have something to offer.

That the thinking thus far.

Bishop: Released into Language

Bishop, Wendy. *Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing*. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990.

Bishop's book focuses on bringing comp theory, especially comp theory that focuses on the writing process, over to creative writing pedagogy. She's best for her leads, which are all 70s and 80s stuff. I think comp theory moved on from process, but I suppose there are still some process folks around. I'll need to look for more current stuff in addition to her leads.

I guess this means that CW people like Harris who are calling for process theory are about 30-40 years behind comp theory? Or, at least, they are doing what comp people were doing 40 years back.

She distinguishes between the "traditional" and the "transactional" workshops. Traditional focus on text, transactional on process.

She sums up the comp research like so:

Cognitive research helps writing teachers understand the basic writer as someone who is rule governed (generally inappropriately so), who has trouble imagining audiences other than herself, and who has inflexible revising and writing strategies and an underdeveloped sense of the composing process. Successful writers are...able to decide upon audience and to tailor the developing text to audience demands and rhetorical demands. The successful writer not only has flexible composing and revising strategies but also has a wealth of successful, previous writing experience to draw on, enabling her to make and adjust writing goals to suit a particular writing situation. And it is this fluency, flexibility, and sense of a writer as someone who writes that can be highlighted in the creative writing workshop. (22)

That's all I got from her. The rest was options for classroom exercises and methods of grading student work.


Leads:

Looks like I can probably start with Flowers and Hayes
Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. 1981. "A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing." *College Composition and Communication* 32:365-87.

...actually I think Hayes had an article in our Literacy book that developed that model further...

For critics/extensions of process she cites "structural social theorists":
Pat Bizzell (1984) "What happens when basic writers come to college" --this one was a presentation as it turns out.

Marilyn Cooper (1986) "The Ecology of Writing." College English 31: 134-42.

Kenneth Bruffee (1984) "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind." College english 46: 635-52.

these folks say "composing does not occur only for an individual...or in the head...but also in complex social settings which affect the ways in which both basic and professional writers write" (23)

and ethnographic studies:
Heath (1983) *Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms*. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984) *Language Stories and Literacy Lessons.* Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.

She says these ones "let us see that composing is transactional, negotiated by writers within households, schools, and communities, and that social/biographical factors also affect the writing of any individual" (23)

Says these two have more on these theories:
Faigley, Lester. 1986. "Competing Theories of Process." *College English* 48 (October): 527-42.

Berlin 1987 *Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.* Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
----- 1984 Writing Instruction in 19th Century American Colleges.

Harris Article

An elegant, if a bit grumpy, article from Mike Harris over at TEXT offers his thoughts about the current direction of creative writing theory.

Has a nice metaphor for CW practice before the call for theory: "Meat-and-Two-Veg"

Don't we always choose that old recipe, the meat-and-two-veg of creative writing: one part realism, one part romance and a big dollop of neo-classical craft-based formalism? But this is one reason some creative writing academics are calling for more and different 'theory': they either don't accept that 'Meat-and-Two-Veg' is a theory or, if they do, they think it's well past its sell-by date and very bad for us.

Harris has problems with broadening the critical diet, too. Here he is on the interpretation/production issue:

Now, there is a problem here, because literary studies and creative writing are very distinct activities. The former is concerned with interpretation, the latter with creation. Or, if you like, writers produce, critics consume. As a result nearly all literary theory is consumption theory, focusing entirely on the relationship between reader and the text, with little or nothing to say about production.

Teaching theory unrelated to production is, for Harris, simply a waste of time: "precious creative writing teaching-time is wasted in favour of trying logically to explicate...literary theories."

And he finds the current call for CW theory, with its interest in poststructuralism and postmodernism, guilty of "yoking-together of philosophical incompatibles," as when CW scholars take on theories antagonistic to agency and selfhood while still suggesting that individuals can be taught a skill like writing:

To conceive of constructing anything - be it a personality or a poem - requires at least some conception of individual autonomy and free will but in, for example, Derridean poststructuralism both of these can only be the illusory symptoms of equally illusory 'metaphysical' discourse, which is itself a mere epiphenomenon of the ultimately unfathomable linguistic différance or trace that he alleges exists between one word and another without 'origin' or ultimately determinable meaning.

Here's Harris's definition of creative writing theory:

Writing is part of a wider creative process. In this process writing can be individual, collaborative, or both and can incorporate contributions from 'non-writers'. The writing process, in the widest sense, is everything that happens to a work before it is 'finished'.[12] This would include thinking, researching, planning, writing drafts, consciously revising, consciously manipulating the unconscious and being unconsciously driven by it. The study of writing is thus the study of a process, of a constantly moving and changing object, not a fixed field or 'text'.

It's all process for Harris. Which is rather limiting, I think. And in fact, the comp theory that has been done on the writing process has demonstrated that audience considerations are an important part of that process. Which means that theories of production are to some extent informed by theories of interpretation, or should at least be informed by them. Put simply, writers need to know how readers read in order to write for them. Of course, not all readers read like Derrida...but many do read like feminists and post-colonialists and people who work with identity politics. Reader response theory is especially pertinent, I think...anyway.

Here's Harris's list of what we should be doing. Several exciting projects here, and I hope he's getting to work:

Once we have escaped the dazzling tractor beam of inappropriate literary theory, and focused clearly on the writing process now and in history, wide fields of study open up before us. Many have already been cleared by literary scholars working on areas once marginalised in the academy by the dominance of anti-authorial theory - for example: literary biography; attribution studies; the work done by all literary critics when they edit texts and track the changes from one draft to another. The social, psychological and technological differences in historical writing practices are also, of course, significant, as well as the similarities, and could form the basis of legitimate creative writing research (see Larson 1986). Most important of all would be the return to centre stage, through its study in creative writing, of literary aesthetics - poetics - because it is arguably the one indispensible part of our writing process.

The social, psychological and technological differences in historical writing practices—that is the book I want to read next. Get crackin' Harris!

There was another quote I pulled that I have to include, a great, and very practical rebuttal of "readers do the writing":

The notion of the reader essentially 'writing' relies on a redefinition of the two terms that dissolves the essential differences between them; a process by which anything can always be said to be really anything else. For example: I might decide that eating is really cooking and, as long as the rest of my 'discourse community' agree, the redefinition will hold. It's just that, given the actual differences, if we really believe that eating food cooks it, and act upon the belief, then we will probably have to resign ourselves to a raw cold diet, and periodic intestinal disorders.

This is my point about writers needing to be pragmatists at some level. You can't be all spun out in theory and still write unless you are comfortable with a whole series of contradictions inherent in that state of being.

All in all, I like Harris's corrective. He's clearly informed about his Derrida, and I should probably revisit this essay if/when I get deeper into D's work. Harris is helping to point the way forward; he's trying to shake us loose of theory that wasn't meant for writers and is even counterproductive for the writing process. Clearing the ground to start fresh. It's a good instinct.

Some areas CW theory might investigate, based on this and other articles and my own sense of what Harris has left out:

Creativity
Writing Process
Formalism/craft
Rhetorical criticism
Audience studies

That last one, audience studies, means "how readers read." And it is an area that could include the whole history of interpretive theory, but should not be limited to that history. Important help can be gained from other areas. Media studies for example has some interesting things to say about how audiences react to media. And ethnographic research of reading communities. And psych. etc...


Leads from Harris:

Pfenninger, Karl H, and Valerie R Shubik 2001 The origins of creativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Czikszentmihayli, Mihaly 1997 Creativity and the psychology of discovery and invention, New York: Harper Collins

Nelson, Camilla 2008 'Research through practice: a reply to Paul Dawson', TEXT 12.2, October

questions

Questions on the relationship of Author to Authorship

What is an author? What does it mean to be one? Is "author" even the right word for what we're talking about or is there a better term? What sort of power does this position have, what sort of *authority*, if any? How is such power best used? What does it mean to call oneself an author? Why would anyone do so? What sort of people desire to attain this position? What are their motives? Is authorship a democratic institution, available to all, or is it an elite post, attainable only by a few? If democratic, what value does it have to call oneself an author? If elite, what qualities must one have to become one of these few? Are these qualities obtainable by anyone or are they a "gift"? What do we mean when we say that we are authors? Why do we say it?


Questions on the relationship of Author to Text

What do authors do? How? How can they do it better, and how could one learn to do what authors do? What is the nature of the writing process? What qualities make for a more effective execution of that process? Exactly what sort of "control" does an author exercise over a text? Conversely, how does a text exercise control over an author? Do authors write texts or vice versa? Similarly, do authors *make* texts or vice versa? To what extent do other texts influence authors as their write their own? What can authors do to make a "good" text? A "better" text? Is there such a thing? How would one—how *does* an author—decide whether a text is "good" and how to go about making it "better"?


Questions on the relationship of Author to Reader

What are the parameters of this relationship? Since this relationship is mediated by a text, how does that mediation affect the nature of exchange between these parties? Who exercises power over whom? How? To what extent? How much of a reader's experience can an author reliably control or predict? What sorts of ethical decision and responsibilities does author owe to reader? Why is "reader" singular? Shouldn't we be talking about "readers" in the plural, and how does this plurality alter the way we think about this/(these) relationship(s)? What do readers read and why? How can they be best addressed by authors who want to achieve a particular end or effect?


Questions on the relationship of Author to World

What does it mean to be an author in this world? What do authors do? What sort of effect does this have on the world? What responsibilities does an author have to the world? To what extent does the world shape an author and his/her work? Is the author a free agent, solely responsible for his/her actions, or is the author a conduit for the world, which expresses itself through the author? Who gets to be an author anyway and how? What powers and institutions act as gatekeepers for this position and what is their agenda? How is the status of authorship related to identity and identity politics?


Questions on the relationship of Author to Language

Who is in charge here? Is there any author outside of language? Is language an author's material, like a painter's oil and canvass? Or is language an elusive force that cannot be fully controlled, one that even takes over the composing process at times? Can language refer to anything outside of itself? If so or if not, what implications does this have for the author's task? If we think of language as necessarily social and society as necessarily political, how ought the social and political nature of language inform our thinking about authors and authorship? How ought it to inform the way authors go about the act of writing?

map

This is my little map of the elements of literature. I've tried to make it as general and uncontroversial as possible, but of course it's impossible to avoid some amount of controversy. The assertion that there are "elements" in something called "literature" that can be "mapped" already raises eyebrows somewhere in academia. Likewise, that there should be only five elements, or only *these* five, causes a new set of problems for some folks. But I think for the purposes of general conversation about the things that are important to include in our discussion of literature, this map serves as at least a rough guide to the territory. Present are Author, Text, Reader, World, and Language. I'm using the term "World" here in the most general sense; it is the Great Thing that contains all the other, lesser things. In this case, I'm featuring a few of these lesser things as of particular interest to theories of literature, namely authors, who write texts; texts, which are written and read; readers, who read texts; and language, which is the medium in which authors write, texts are composed, and readers read.

For some academics, "World" is just another aspect of Language, which contains all things. All the things we talk about, at least. And for these critics, my map seems to make a poorly articulated argument against the centrality of language. I've made "World" and "Language" separate entities, with "Language" subordinate to "World." In other words, I seem to have made a claim that there is an objective world outside of language, which contains language as one of its parts. I do not mean to make such an argument, but I also do not wish to make the reverse argument, that language is all in all and that there is nothing outside of the "Text." I could have drawn my map so that language was on equal footing with the world, encompassing the lower half of the large oval, but this would only have created new problems by creating a central opposition between "World" and "Language" as if these were clearly distinguishable and irreconcilable.

To some extent, the category "World" is also my way of including other "elements" that I haven't featured here. Time, for example, is an aspect of "World" that plays an important role in literature, especially since author and reader may exist centuries apart, a gap traversed by the text. Race, gender, class, Capital, History, and technology are other elements I've not featured, but which constitute important aspects of "World." To give "Language" equal billing with "World" would have given it priority over these other elements and therefore privileged post-structural theories of language over other, equally important academic work.

For English speakers, there is an implied directionality from author to text to reader, since we read from left to right. However, I did not draw arrows along this line because this is not a unilateral relationship. All elements have some degree of influence upon all the others, so that, if I had started drawing arrows, I wouldn't have known where to stop.

The value of this map is that it gives some orientation for understanding the emphases of various theories. New Criticism emphasizes only the text, and makes an effort to exclude all the other elements. Deconstruction emphasizes language to the exclusion of all other elements...or to the absorption and dissolution of all other elements, which is more or less what is meant by "Nothing is outside of the Text." Language is everything. Some theories take more than one element into account. Mimetic theories emphasize the relationship between text and the world. Reader-response criticism focuses on readers and the world, conceived of as a world of other readers forming interpretive communities. And some theories have a particular interpretation of how all the elements work together; Rhetorical theories, for example, understand literature as something authors do with language in texts in order to persuade readers and thereby influence the world.

Creative writing theory is meant to address the needs of authors, to help them better understand what it is that they do and the means by which they do it. For this reason, it will be important to gain an understanding of all these elements from the perspective of the author. What is the author's relationship to the text? To readers? To language? To the world? To authorship, even? These are the most basic questions of creative writing theory, and upon investigation of them, theorists can expect to discover further questions that concern matters of writing practice and pedagogy, matters of practical concern to authors who write and teach.

Investigation of these questions will also necessarily encounter theories of literature (and theories applied to literature) that are written from perspectives other than that of the author. Most Theory, in fact, is theory of interpretation, written from the perspective of the reader. These theories have various ways of addressing the author and thinking about the role of authorship in literary "meaning."

Theories that exclude the author or challenge the status of the author in some way are theories that creative writing theory ought to address as challenges and opportunities. These theories challenge creative writing theory to justify its existence and the validity of its project. In this way, they also provide an opportunity for creative writing theory to strengthen its claims and clarify its position on the author's relationship to the elements of literature emphasized by these challenging theories.

Theories that do not exclude the author still generally understand the author from the perspective of the reader, and so creative writing theorists must exercise caution when appropriating these theories, taking care to reevaluate their treatment of authorship.

Of course, creative writing theory, while drawing on the work of existing theories, need not limit itself to the work of interpretive theorists. Creative writing theory can begin with its own observations of the experience of literature from an author's point of view. It can also draw on work in other fields, such as the work of composition scholars the testimony of working writers about the nature of what they do, and psychological and philosophical treatments of creativity.

Bizzaro

Bizzaro, Patrick. Responding to Student Poems: Applications of Critical Theory. National Council of Teachers of English, 1993. Print.

Bizzaro's project is to adapt Theory to the problem of evaluating student poetry. He examines four critical stances (New Criticism, reader response, deconstruction, feminism) and tests them out by attempting to read his students' poetry from each perspective and reporting on the results. To be sure, this is not much of a methodology; he limits himself to three poems in each case, and because he is attempting to analyze his own application of his own understanding of theories on his own students' poetry...well, there isn't much that can be generalized. And there isn't much distance between him and his "data." But it's not really meant to be scientific; more like the chronicle of a writing instructor testing out ideas and trying to improve on his own work.


NEW CRITICISM

Bizzaro says a major difference between New Criticism and workshop crit is that the student work is seen as unfinished and in need of correction. Even so, both share the following:

meaning arises not from ideology or logic, but from analyzing the structure of norms that direct—in fact, *are*—the reader's experience of the text. Using New Critical values in evaluating student writing thus requires students to believe that the teacher's reading of the text, as the meaning rendered by an exemplary reader, is the text as it really exists. (41)

New Critical comments on student texts "respond primarily to textual matters" and "tend to encourage a view of revision as text manipulation"; the danger of this approach "naturally" is that "such comments can easily enable a teacher to appropriate a student's text, since only one text exists, the one the teacher reads and thus rewrites" (43):

In an ineffective adaptation of the New Criticism, a teacher might inadvertently require students to write in a narrow range of poetic styles..On the other hand, it seems to me that the New Criticism might be profitably adapted to the evaluation of student poems if students are involved in the process of identifying the boundaries within which the teacher evaluates their texts...[that is] if it helps students better understand what they want their poems to do and, at the same time, enables the teacher to stay involved in the student's writing processes. (54)

Quotes Richard Hugo: "If I can, I talk as if I'd written the poem myself and try to find out why and where it went wrong" (55).

This Hugo quote can either be read as appropriate modeling of the revision process, or as a presumptuous appropriation of student work. I tend to side with the latter reading. To talk as if I've written someone else's poem myself is to ignore the author's aspirations for the work as if they were irrelevant. And then to impose my own aspirations upon it w/o any concern for the actual motivations for the work. This is perhaps a different kind of intentional fallacy. Your intention is fallacious; mine is true.

Bizzaro says students respond to the New Critical type of commentary by "hypercorrection," over doing their revision to meet his standards: e.g. "Penny has hypercorrected in certain places, attempting to write the poem she believed I wanted her to write, the poem she might have believed I would have written had this been my first draft" (57).

Rather than impose his own list of criteria on student work, Bizzaro wonders:

Isn't there someway to involve students in the development of such a list of criteria so that they might aid me in making a more accurate statement of what they should attempt to produce in revising their texts into acceptable poems?...Isn't there something basically wrong with telling students, in effect, that their grades will be determined by how nearly they make *their* poems conform to *my* biases?"(63)

And he explores the remaining three theories in an attempt to answer these questions.


READER RESPONSE

Bizzaro introduces reader response in order to begin addressing the problems of New Criticism in the writing workshop. He does so without once ever mentioning Stanley Fish, let alone examining any of Fish's work. One passing citation of Iser, and that's it for actually looking at the theory. Makes me skeptical about his work here, as if he's getting his theory second- or third-hand somewhere. He does the same in his next chapter, by covering Deconstruction without so much as a nod in Derrida's direction.

Anyway, Bizzaro feels that reader response allows for a more cooperative relationship between teacher and student:

If properly adapted to the classroom situation, reader-response methodologies will require that students determine who they want their texts to address and that teachers relinquish some power in examining those texts. Rather than enforcing their readings of student poems as definitive, teachers must willingly submit to the text, participating in the development of the reader summoned by the text and evoked, knowingly or unknowingly, by the author...Since the writer makes choices that dictate who the reader will be, the problem a student must solve in revision is how to make certain that the text will be read as he or she intended. (67)

There are already some problems reconciling this statement with actual reader response theory. How is an author to exercise control over a reader's responses when it is a community of readers that determines the meaning of a work? What is "the reader" anyway, and why "the"? Are we assuming a unified response from all readers? Or is this some kind of abstraction, and if so, what is its purpose? What aspect of reading/readers does it represent? Bizzaro doesn't ask or answer these questions. So the problems lie in wait.

The teacher-reader must thus make an effort to envision the audience that the writer's text produces. And the student-writer must revise the test to more effectively address (and thereby create) the audience. (68).

Maybe he's drawing this stuff from Iser. That is possible. The "implied reader." But he doesn't use that term. Or quote Iser. So we don't really know what Bizzaro is doing here. He assumes that texts "produce" and "create" audiences, which is a really interesting theory, but how does it work? How do texts do that and how can authors control the process? If writing instructors are to help students revise to do this more effectively, by what criteria are they to offer comments and criticism?

Rather than relinquishing control of the text to the teacher [or the reader], students must work cooperatively with their teacher-readers in determining what the poem might become, a process that includes the critical consideration of who the poem addresses. For teachers, the task of response requires that they view their students as writers who seek to create not just a text, but a reader as well. (68)

I think this "work cooperatively" business is the heart and soul of reader response for Bizarro. He's not too interested in the deep theory, he just wants a way of working with students and evaluating their poetry that doesn't impose the teacher's biases on student work. I like him for that. And I do like this idea of reading texts in light of the audiences they (invoke?). Even if it may require some work to establish that poems can actually invoke audiences and then more work to demonstrate the means by which they do so and even more work to offer students the tools by which to effectively utilize those means, this perhaps untheorized emphasis on "the reader" has the great benefit of not presuming that the CW professor (or the CW workshop for that matter) is the sole intended audience for a work. I think Mayers best stuff was an expansion of this instinct in Bizzaro.

Reader response, for PB, is not so much about the text as the dynamic between author and audience:

Even in my earliest adaptations of reader-response methods, I found that less attention went to the text than to the evolving relationship between the writer and the reader as they determine what the text will be. (69)

There is more to explore here, too, as questions of appropriation rise in a new form. Now the professor must appropriate not the student's poem, but his/her audience. By commenting as one of the invoked readers, the professor assumes competence to do so. But what if the intended audience shares a culture and language and literary tradition and values and tastes that are completely foreign to me? Here were right back to this questions: Can I speak on behalf of the "Other?" Or, more pointedly: What right do I have to talk on behalf of someone whose experience is not my own?

Bizzaro finds that student revisions based on reader-reponse commentaries are "more extensive and far less predictable" than those based on New Critical analysis (83), which goes to show that his purpose in appropriating his own version of reader response works for his purposes. The poem belongs more completely to the poet than when the professor takes over and offers specific changes. Unless we start to think of the audience as a key component in shaping any written work; in that case, Bizzaro may unintentionally be appropriating student work more completely than ever before, since he now speaks for The Reader.


DECONSTRUCTION

This was my least favorite of Bizzaro's chapters. I have to confess I need to read up more on this stuff myself, and I'm just as put off (and/or intimidated) by Derrida's style as everyone else. Even so, from what little I do know of Derrida's work and the literary criticism that claims to derive from that work, I don't think Bizzaro's "deconstructive" readings of student poems is really what it claims to be.

He frames it this way:

A deconstructive pedagogy...will be founded chiefly on the issue of difference, on analyzing the incongruities in a text, on applying pressure to a poem's seams and thereby uncovering what has been intentionally or unintentionally excluded....What deconstruction enables a reader to acknowledge...are the complex disagreements warring within any text. (95)

Which is okay as far as I know. And then there's this:

Deconstruction enables us to explore with our students the conflicting forces of signification that constitute the work itself....Any effort to adapt deconstruction to the evaluation of student poems must therefore reflect an effort to read differently, so that the conflicts submerged beneath the literal level—that is, those conflicts not readily available to us through our "usual" ways of reading—can be uncovered and brought to the surface. (96)

Which also sounds pretty good. And then, I think, he gets down to what he really wants to say:

Deconstruction offers us a way to read deeper, to read more closely than even the New Critics urged, by focusing the reader's attention on what the student has failed to say. Among other things, deconstruction gives license for readers to do what many teachers have been doing all along when they have asked students to write more about this or that undeveloped portion of the text. (97)

Most of his "deconstructive" comments on student poems are not so much deconstructive as more of "what many teachers have been doing all along." He points to things that the student didn't do and leaves it an open question as to whether or not the student ought to explore/develop those qualities of the poem. For example, he tells one student that "excluded are the possibilities of letting this setting function symbolically" (102), which is not so much deconstructive as a "Hey, look. You didn't do this." I get that he's leaving things open, but to point out to a student what they did not do doesn't strike me as very helpful. At best it's obvious and beside the point; at worst it's just another way of imposing the professor's biases upon the student, as in "You didn't do this and you really should have."

And I don't think it's really deconstruction. I imagine that if he read poems to demonstrate their instability and inability to "mean" what it pretends to mean... I imagine that would be a weird thing for a writing instructor to do. It dismantles the whole project of writing... I don't know. I gots to read up some more to comment fully here.

I think this is what he really wants to say, Derrida or no Derrida:

by relinquishing authority for the text, it is possible to empower students to serve as authorities over the text they want to write, if not always the one they have written. Students also learn something about how to read deconstructively. (122)

Even if that last claim is dubious, his heart is in the right place, no?


FEMINISM

Bizzaro spends most of this chapter worrying about how to be a man doing feminist readings. What he says about the use of Feminism in the CW classroom is less extensive:

Feminisit theory looks not for what has been excluded, but for what has been *silenced*; that is, reading from a feminist critical perspective requires a sensitivity to elements of gender that may typify the reading habits of some, though not all, readers of a text. (124)

"Silenced" rather than "excluded" is the distinction that separates Feminism from Deconstruction for Bizzaro, really more a matter of emphasis than distinction. And Feminism acts like reader-response for Bizzaro, too:

From a feminist perspective, evaluation must involve a dialogue between reader and writer about the text as it develops. Dialogue is critical to this approach to evaluation. But of more importance than the invitation to participate is how the dialogue is handled. Rather than a debate format, where the participants/combatants are able to stake out their positions in advance to make an adversarial reading, a feminist approach manages conversations...[by] cultivating differences. (137)

Feminism brings something new to the CW class by introducing political inquiry at all levels:

If one of a course's goals is to call upon feminist criticism for assistance in reading student poems, then the teacher must consider the matter of ethos throughout the semester. This means, of course, opening up oneself, one's political stance, and one's teaching methods for critique. It also means being a conscious reader, one who not only recognizes the impact of various literary-critical theories on the reading of student texts, but one who plans on using those methods as well. (138)

Somehow, though, Feminist poetics ends back where Romanticism left off:

teachers who hope to employ feminist criticism in reading their students' poems must use their authority in the classroom to undermine that very authority. This means that the decision of whether to revise or not revise must rest with the students themselves, that they must be encouraged to be less concerned with pleasing the reader and more concerned with expressing themselves. (144)

That's a weird mix of gender politics and "self-expression" ideology. Wandor wouldn't like it too much, I think.

And then Bizzaro makes a move that seems to call on Fish's idea of "interpretive communities" when he says that he felt "obliged to consider the political ramifications of using feminist criticism to read student poems"; and this meant "offering not a requirement that they think differently, but the recommendation that it is to their benefit as writers to be able to read from the perspectives of different communities, even communities they might not choose to stay in for long" (144,145).

Finally, no matter what decision they ultimately make, I wanted my students to realize that from at least one perspective—that is, in the eyes of one community of readers—all texts, both theirs and the ones assigned from the anthology, are political documents. And for some, politics arise from the gender codes that can be found in the language itself. By helping my students understand this particular orientation to language, I hoped they would see that by using feminist criticism in reading their texts, I was not offering an authoritarian judgment, but showing them how their poems might be read by a reader who has been sensitized to gender. (145)

Bizzaro closes the chapter by indicating that student responses to his comments along these lines vary, and are entirely student directed.

Not clear yet on how I'll be using Bizzaro. Seems clear I'll need to cite him anytime I want to talk about the relationship of any of these theories to CW practice. So far, he's provided a helpful nuance in my aims. He took theory and applied it to CW pedagogy in a way I don't need to or want to repeat. How to evaluate student work is an important and practical question, but not one that interests me this semester.

Not sure exactly what my niche will be yet, either.