Camoin, Francois. "The Workshop and Its Discontents."
In favor of theory:
I would like to argue, I think, that just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so critical theory is too important to be left to the critics. (4)The "law" of silence:
[I]t is the Law of the Workshop, as powerful as the law of incest is int he culture at large, that *the author must not speak*. This fundamental Law shapes the workshop, makes it what it its. (4)Totally nuts. But generally accepted, I think.
Unexamined theory is still theory, and a theory already explicated by some other theorist:
The theory (whether we want to call it that or not) is always there, though it's often suppressed, disguised as craft, or common sense, or literary taste, or *what-I-have-learned-in-twenty-years-of-being-a-writer.* But, finally, it comes down to speaking about how texts mean, what they do, how they exist in the world, how they function. We can look into our hearts all we want; what we will find there will always be somebody else—Henry James or Percy Lubbock or E. M. Forster. Or Barthes, Kristeva, Irigaray. (5)Theory helps us with revision:
It's not a bad thing, this critical theory...It gives us a way to talk to ourselves when the Orphic fever has died down, the first draft is done, and we're faced with the problems of craft. (5)Tips his hand that his "theory" is mostly formalist stuff:
The student who learns that he has // no intentions worth talking about—that he has nothing to say when he sits down at the typewriter, only something to make—will write much better fiction. The student who thinks about narrative logic, writing strategies, the foregrounding or erasing of the narrative act, who has learned that writing fiction consists largely of putting off telling a story, (that in fact the ingenious devices by which she delays the story *are*, in the end, the story) will write better fiction than when she is trying to make the reader feel what she felt when her aunt Maggie died. The reader will still weep, if weeping is called for. (5-6)These next two name the key difference between the writer and the critic:
I'm writing the story...I have options. The question is how to think about them in such a way as to write a better story. Or else I'm reading the story in a workshop, and the question is then how to talk about the options effectively. (6)Domina, Lynn. "The Body of My Work Is Not Just a Metaphor."
My critical colleagues—it's not a fault, it's the nature of what they do—never see the text at that instant where it must become something else. Sometimes they burrow through the special collections and come upon first drafts, or incomplete attempts, but those are texts already frozen, traces of a process always already completed. (7)
We apprehend truth, as writers, at least as much with our bodies as with our minds...yet the form or hue or movement of our bodies will suffer [dis]approbation from a community of writers much more quickly than any movement of our mind—though this [dis]approbation will almost inevitably be vehemently disguised as criticism of our work. (28)
She's something of an expressivist, saying things like "one of the primary tasks of the student writer is to learn trust and acceptance of the self" (28) and "Know thyself...and the metaphors will come" (29). And yet she offers qualifiers like: "literature is not primarily therapy, workshops are not therapy sessions" (30). So I suppose she means that confidence in identity precedes good writing, and that workshops ought to be self-aware in their identity politics if they are to offer an environment supportive of a student's best work.
in the undergraduate classroom many students confront difference to a much greater extent than they have in the past, which can be very good for writing, but which also can have devastating effects both in execution and reception—to the extent that difference is threatening rather than engaging, to the extent that difference is hierarchialized // and hierarchy condoned in the classroom as it is outside the classroom. (29-30)Here's her best point, I think, that unexamined workshops can suppress good writing:
what many traditional-age college students...long to do *is* to write mildly embellished autobiography. Much of the time, this is completely appropriate. Much more dangerous is s student's internal or external pressure to avoid autobiography.
For many students, this risk of revelation is exacerbated by their place in society. The dictum to write about what they know about means writing as a person of color in a racist culture, writing as a gay man or lesbian in a homophobic culture, writing as a woman in a sexist culture—and the culture of workshops consists of instructors and classmates who are as likely to be bigoted as anyone else in our reputed melting pot. If a writer's obsessions arise from experiences of exclusion, changing the proper nouns hardly suffices as protection when the excluder is running the workshop...And although students // who impose self-censorship may write competent, even eloquent sentence, the body of their work will lack the requisite investment and passion of the truly promising writer. (31-32)
Writing about what you know about often implies writing about what other members of the workshop will not know about, which is easily enough dealt with if what you know about is running a dairy farm or swimming competitively or communicating with an Australian via short-wave radio, less easily dealt with if what you know about is prostitution or incest or addiction, and much less easily handled if what you know about is anger at your exclusion from a culture by white people or by wealthy people or by men or by heterosexuals, who are all your classmates and/or your teacher. (33)It seems to me that this is good justification for a workshop that begins with student intent. Who are you writing to and why and how can we as a class help you achieve that goal? How ought we to read? If we start there, then at least these issues are foregrounded in the workshop itself.
Berry, R.M. "Theory, Creative Writing, and the Impertinence of History."
His best line is his first:
One could persuasively argue that in America the most influential theory of literature since World War II has been Creative Writing. (57)And, of course, that is exactly what he intends to argue. Not sure why he needs to be cute about it. Nevertheless, he's saying that CW *is* theory or is itself *a* theory. Smart move.
On the public influence of CW:
Most concretely, this influence makes itself felt on the public audiences for the writers' festivals, summer workshops, and readings sponsored by Creative Writing programs or faculty. Less noticeable but possibly more significant is the presence of Creative Writers on literary awards committees, editorial // boards, government funding agencies, small and large presses, book reviews, magazines, and virtually all other organs of contemporary literature. (57-58)He brings in the training of poets in antiquity:
That Creative Writing is a theory of literature seems less peculiar when Creative Writing is compared to the literary apprenticeship it replaced. Prior to the nineteenth century the most widespread European model of the poet's education tended to de-emphasize individual creativity and to foreground the deliberate imitation of other poets...According to this pedagogy, the apprentice poet learned to replicate and adapt various models under the supervision of someone who had established his...reputation as a master. (58)He examines Castiglione's *The Courtier* as an explanation of Renaissance apprenticeship:
Contrary to modern expectations, what the Greek or Roman apprentice gleaned from models was not technique only, but plots, themes, scenes, vocabulary, and even the topics of characters speeches, as though becoming a poet involved both learning a skill and acquiring a repertory of stories or lore. (58)
What did strike them forcefully—the Greek and Latin writers as well as their Renaissance imitators—was the sharp difference between a master's transformation of a model and a novice's copying of one. (59)
Where the difference between the Renaissance and our present institution appears sharpest is in their directly opposite remedies for affectation. Whereas Creative Writing might advise a mannered writer to find a subject, style, or voice truly her own, *The Courtier* advises further and wider-ranging imitation. Given all else in sufficient measure, Castiglione insists, imitation can make any voice, style or subject the writer's own. (60)He turns to Bakhtin to show that perhaps the early pedagogy has more merit than we might expect:
the old pedagogy imagined no unembattled realm // within which learning could occur. Education was, from the outset, a venture into occupied territory...*The Courtier's* assumption that nothing is inviolably one's own—except one's limitations—seems the vertiginous downside of the idea that anyone can learn to become just about anything. (60-1)
For Bakhtin, imitation is the inescapable condition of speaking because language is no abstract for or tool to be picked up and layered back down. (61)Then he turns to the theory that is CW:
Creative Writing's differentiation of itself from literary study appears—to an imitative poetics—as the severing of practice from its ground in the real life of language, the history of saying. The distinctive pedagogical innovation of Creative Writing—viz., the workshop—is a forum oriented exclusively to the present. (63)All in all a compelling argument for an imitative practice, or at least for some responsible ("answerable") engagement with language and its history.
Treating writers' language as unoccupied territory, Creative Writing from the start suppressed its own otherness. (72)
An early poet confident of the tradition and community he inhabited may not have felt // particularly self-conscious about imitating, but for poets—both in the Renaissance and today—whose relation to tradition is what modernity has rendered problematic, making one's writing answerable to and for some past may be precisely what's needed for that writing to count. This task can seem overwhelming, for it demands nothing less than the full acknowledgment of the nightmare that history threatens to become. To the extent that Creative Writing protects present poets from this nightmare, it obscures obstacles to practice and lulls poetry into continued sleeping. A political task of literary study today, and of its theory and practice, its creation and criticism, its teaching and writing, is to wake up. (72-3)
