Literacy and CW

The paper I should have written last semester would have looked at bringing some of the insights from the discourse relating to issues of literacy over to the CW conversation. Creative Writing is still writing, even though it likes to pretend it belongs in a special class, apart from inventory lists and emails and such. Writing is writing, and the same (or at least many of the same) observations apply.

One way to approach this is to think about "creative writing literacy" as a type of literacy and to examine it as literacy has been examined generally. The questions at the end of Foucault's "What is an Author?" point toward this type of examination, in part.

Let me see if I can remember what I read:

We read Walter Ong on how writing transforms consciousness. If you take him at his word—and I think there is some of his argument that is salvageable without coming off like a bigot—then we could think about how that transformation affects storytelling and poetry. How does it change fiction, or, more appropriately, how we think fiction and poetry, to be able to write them down? How does it change the social dynamics of Creative Writing that it is no longer strictly an oral performance? Rereading him with these questions in mind might be productive. If speculative.

We read Brian Street and his Autonomous model vs. Ideological model of literacy. I'd have to reread to get exactly what the Autonomous model implied but the gist (as I remember it) is that anthropologists and others assumed that Literacy was a fixed thing, you had it or you didn't, and if you didn't you were less developed, less intelligent than cultures that did. The Ideological model suggests that literacy practices are multiple and are socially and economically determined. Street went to a rural town in Iran and looked at their literacy practices, demonstrating how they were related to economic changes in the region.

If we apply this to fiction, then we can say that the kind of fiction that gets written—the kind that gets published and read—is determined by social and economic forces as well. This takes us into Marxist critique territory. Was it Eagleton who said that literature is ideology? There may be some parallels to draw between these two. My choices as a writer, my freedom and success as a writer, are constrained by the economic and political conditions I face daily, including when I sit at the computer to write. How I write and who I write to are both choices that have economic and political consequences as well.

Brandt (Literacy in American Lives) interviewed 80 or so folks in Wisconsin for their personal histories with writing and found that these practices were very much determined by social and economic changes in America over the course of a century. Brandt's big concept was "sponsors" of literacy; she found that people who experienced success with literacy found favorable sponsors during the course of their lives, sponsors who introduced them to the writing skills necessary for success in a particular field.

The university has become a sponsor of creative literacy. It allows and also denies access to creative literacy practice. This is quite an impressive cultural power. Is the university the only sponsor of creative literacy? I'm quite sure it is the most powerful. The most widely influential. And so the discourse and practices in academic creative writing circles are now the very things that determine creative practice and written cultural production in the culture. We decide who gets to and who doesn't, and, perhaps more importantly, we decide why. The criteria we set for admission and success are standards we impose on the kinds of creative writing that happen in America.

Stuckey, who I didn't actually read but should, equated literacy with violence, suggesting that because literacy allows some access to privilege and denies others the same, and because access is unevenly distributed along lines of race, class, gender, that literacy itself is an oppressive force.
I gots to read this and draw on it. Seems like it would offer a serious critique of CW in the academy.

NAAL, The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, is mostly about reading skills, but it gives a good picture of who is capable of reading literary fiction. Not many people. And people who can are far more likely to be wealthy and white. So the choice to write literary fiction is a choice to write to a particular, privileged audience.

Gee's big idea was Primary and Secondary discourse. He also had a great, all inclusive definition of literacy. Primary discourse is what you get at home. Secondary discourse is what you have to pick up second-hand, and it is basically impossible to really fully acquire a secondary discourse. Middle class homes share a primary discourse with the educational institutions, so middle class kids take to the discourse at schools like fish to water. Lower class homes, minority homes, do not share the same discourse as their learning environments, and so are forever at a disadvantage in terms of gaining the literacy skills required to be successful in this economy.
Gee's stuff adds to the critique of CW in the academy, which by and large excludes lower class minorities from creative writing production.

His inclusive definition of literacy might make for an interesting examination of CW literacy. writing-reading-talking-feeling-thinking-believing...or something to that effect. It includes everything from body language to political views. What is the "literacy" of CW programs? What does it take to be a successful workshop participant? What are the unwritten, but still powerful, behavioral injunctions that guide workshop practice? We must examine these, since they represent more of what we actually teach than we realize; they, together, tell students: "A writer is someone who acts/thinks/speaks/critiques/writes/reads/gestures/positions him/herself like this."

The New London Group's pedagogy stated that literacy is not a singular thing. Multiliteracies was the term. And their approach to education was to go out into communities and ask what sorts of skills/knowledge people thought would be useful to them, and then they did their best to pass on those skills and/or that knowledge. Just came across a reference to a source from the 70s that suggested that CW students should be treated the same way. You find out what they want to do first, and then try to help them do it. Everyone who comes into the classroom has a different motivation, history, desired trajectory, etc. Each student has a different idea of what skills/knowledge would be useful and we could approach CW instruction as if it were a space where these resources are available rather than as a place where a particular aesthetic is imposed.

I know we read other stuff, but I'm going to have to go digging. And I'm not sure how to organize this and integrate it with the CW stuff I've been reading.