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