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)

Haake Quotes

Haake, Katherine. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. Print.

Haake's book was not the thoroughgoing feminist critique of creative writing pedagogy I was expecting. It was more an act of "being" feminist and creative on the page. Modeling a "feminist" academic prose style, or something to that effect. Never the less there were some useful bits, especially when she does look at power and privilege in the CW classroom.

I pulled some big chunks, basically everything I thought was relevant. When I add "//" to a quote, it signals the page break and is not a part of the text.

Here's her take on writing the "Other":

Imagination is not entirely benign, for to assume that it can transcend the boundaries between us, whoever we might be, and what we loosely, freely call now the Other, is to align ourselves with the same romantic ideologies by which the "Other" has long been contained. It is a vexing problem. Do we simply assume we cannot know anything beyond our own experience—you in your fishbowl and me in mine? Certainly not; but neither can we act as if the fishbowls, which are not of our making, do not exist. (11)

Here's her basic outline of her project for the book:

this book argues for a shift within the discipline that would respond to student difference and allow for reconceiving creative writing as a practice that may take many forms of value in the lives and education of our students. It attempts to formulate a radical pedagogy of inclusion that sees the creative writing classroom as an intra-and interdisciplinary site where basic questions of language and discourse can lead to transformed notions of how we know and experience not just our writing, but ourselves. Such a classroom might be conceived of as a site of bricolage, where the teacher-writer, together with her or his student-writers, uses everything at hand not just to make writing happen, but to do so within a critical framework that reveals writing systems and gives students authority over their own work. (18)

She never did as much with "bricolage" as I was hopping. It seems like a nice way to conceive of the writing process. The bricoleur is something rather close to the "scriptor." They both draw on what's available to make their work. As for the radical pedagogy of inclusion, this never became fully realized in Haake's book.

Next up is a nice take on the power structures that limit creative expression in the West, as well as her cynical take on multicultural publishing. (I wonder if she still feels this way post-Obama. The New Sincerity President, as my wife calls him.)

To the extent that literary culture in this country has been white, middle class, and male, access to that culture has been determined by how one accommodates oneself to the strategies and values of that culture.
But we live in multicultural times, and while it may be argued that current proliferation of American voices reflects a shift in the historical distribution of power within our institutions of literary culture, I suspect that a quick review of New York publishing lists or the tables of contents of major literary journals will reveal instead that the celebration is as much a construction of liberal guilt and politically correct thinking, or a cynical market determination that multiculturalism "sells," as it is any kind of fundamental change in people's underlying attitudes. (54)

This next quote implies an association between romantic ideas of genius and white privilege; it also suggests that "minority" authors are better equipped to understand their writing process and writing "self" in post-structural terms:

Those of us who came to writing aspiring to express our deepest selves may want to maintain the modernist view of the author as inspired genius. And I don't know. Sometimes it seems that all of us must start out // this way, for we are the products of our education and reading. But those of us who have also had difficulty recognizing ourselves in that education and reading will adapt more readily to the notion of author as function. From there to the idea that the self we aspire to express is not natural, singular, and constant, but rather constructed, multiple, and fluid, it is not so far at all, and it is easy.
Assume, then, the latter. Assume that the self—one of many—is constructed in the act of writing, moment by moment, by our entry into language, not our mastery over it. Assume as well that the same may be true when we enter the classroom, that instruction—meaning—is achieved there in the play of signification that occurs *between* teacher and students. Embedded in these assumptions and the ones described above as implicit in the workshop are two different pedagogical stances. One might say, then, that the workshop is the classroom model by which we mark the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. (54-55)

I'm not clear on what she means by that last line, and she never explains it. She seems to suggest that both stances—author as genius and author as function—represent different fears. Both are fears of the "proliferation of meaning." Meaning spreading. Each one fears the other, I suppose... I feel like I'm missing something. Maybe I'll email her.

Later, Haake says she leaned to make writing, "something...open-ended and fluid, a continuously unfolding site of surprise. Palpable, material, and with its own economy, logic, and music—language, I was learning, does not just get written but also somehow writes the writer, who is inscribed, being-written in the moment of the writing." (64)

This "being-written" strikes me as a nice response to post-structuralism, and is actually little more than a reframing of what many poets have reported about their experience all along, that it seems to come from some other place. The gods, or the muses, or inspiration, or the unconscious, or whathaveyou.

Here's a quote that strikes me as a great way to start self-reflection in a writing workshop on day one:

when I asked // the question—what do you want from this class?—students responded, as they almost always do, with the vague assertions: to write, to improve my writing, to talk about my writing with other writers. What was a bit different in this workshop was the explicit requirement that we define our terms and reveal their assumptions by framing such questions as: Write what? Improve according to what criteria? Talk with other writers how? (105-6)

She also requires that students talk about their own assumptions before they give the response that follows from those assumptions. Sounds like a good exercise, a practical entry point to theory for students, one that asks students to being their own theorizing based on experience and might allow for some critical work to be introduced as an aid to these practical questions.

Haake's take on interpretation:

I've never been convinced interpre- // tation is very good for writing. Where there's interpretation, there's an equal sign that functions for the most part to reduce the pure necessity of text. And we should be opposed to this, to anything at all that reduces textuality; we should focus our attention instead not on *what* but on *how* texts mean, trusting that meaning will take care of itself, as it surely will, with the reader. (110-111)

This "how" texts mean is a nice turn of phrase, but still confuses the issue by insisting on "meaning" which I think is an unfortunate term. Still, she points in the direction of rhetorical analysis.

Her exercise by way of Derrida:

In the play of substitution and replacement, which is our way of making meaning, we substitute for what was never really there, the center, and in the process we add something (a "supplement"), and the thing we started with is, in some small way, deferred and transformed. In writing, one possible meaning of the logic of the supplement is that writing itself becomes an endlessly unfolding process. Think of the narrative itself as a sign. As soon as something is added, the narrative is changed, made different, meaning is deferred, and all that precedes what is written is also irrevocably altered...
This is what I call *burrowing*...writing proceeds from language rather than image...Compelled by the process of signification, you burrow into the sign, play it for all it is worth. At the end of the sentence/sign/play, stop, add a new one, begin again, and again, and again. (179)

Haake mentions a student's published novel and another student's published and anthologized short story that both began as this assignment. Proof is in the pudding and all that. I'm not totally convinced. Seems like what a lot of writers do already, but maybe that's her point.

Finally, she tells a story of a young black woman who wrote a story that was an autobiographical report of her abuse experiences. The story seemed tied to details that were factual rather than effective:

As the teacher I tried to focus the discussion on conventions of genre and form. We talked about how work is received, and how, if marked as a "short story," the reader reads it as fiction and expects it to conform to certain conventions...We also talked about the difference between "fiction" and "autobiography," how they are ontologically different...And we talked about organizing texts to generate narrative tension, especially by structuring the kernel events in such a way as to foreground enigma and the hermeneutic code. (189)

Haake sort of gives herself away in that last line. Why should all stories do that? Sure it sounds smart and savvy, but must all stories "foreground enigma and the hermeneutic code?" What a bore. And what about inclusion? Isn't she excluding an author with different aesthetic values? A different sense of purpose and audience? Then she goes on to tell this woman that her story is "not really a 'short story'" and gives a speech about how:

literary short stories...conform to certain narrative conventions. Texts circulate in the world according to the way they align themselves with one set of conventions or another. (190)

True enough, and a fair point to raise, but not if she's not willing to explore the possibility that this young woman has her own vision of how her text might circulate. And, of course, the woman balked at Haake's impositions.

Naturally I believed I had the broad view and that for her to "own" her story she had to place it in relation to a particular tradition she might aspire to. I still believe that. (190)

She goes on to say that she leaned to respect the student's point of view, to appreciate that her struggles to be heard and her context for writing were far different from Haake's own, and that this difference required some amount of consideration.

One last note: she has an assignment where she makes people make a box that represents themselves as writers in some way. with stuff in it. then they write their autobiography as writers. then they write about their "scene of writing, when and how and when you literally do it" (197). Somehow this one is related to Foucault.


Leads

Mentions Peter Stitt and Marjorie Perloff arguing theory in AWP.

Triggering Town guy says "If you want to communicate, use the telephone."

Mayers: second half

Mayers gives us a whole chapter on Heidegger. Not a lot to report from that.

Then a chapter on his terms for a possible alliance between comp and CW. Mostly institutional, which is not really my bag.

But he does finally give up his remedy for institutional-conventional wisdom. This is Mayer's big moment, as far as my interests are concerned:

The relation of poetic craft to rhetoric...is a potentially productive direction. Closer attention to rhetoric—to poetry's potential for persuasion or to the myriad variations in audiences for poetry, for example—would not force poets, in their institutional roles as teachers of creative writing, to abandon any concern with formalism. But it would certainly move formalism into a different context. Assuming a rhetorical perspective on poetic production would compel those in creative writing to consider poetry as a social practice, to consider the material conditions that regulate the publication of poetry, and to work through the consequences of these conditions for those who write poetry and those who read it. In short, the rhetorical perspective...would align creative writers much more closely with their colleagues in composition. (122)

He goes on later about his plan for reforming English. He wants "Writing Studies" as a separate department, which takes care of the intro comp course, and all the writing courses. Makes sense, but it's a huge power grab, and I can't imagine the English folks going for it.

He does some decent work when talking about his suggestions for revising the introductory creative writing course:

the New Critic's insistence on the autonomy of the poem persists more tenaciously in creative writing classrooms than anywhere else...Creative writing pedagogy...primarily focuses on the text's formal and aesthetic qualities, letting social and political considerations into classroom discourse infrequently, intermittently, and usually only with the implication that such considerations are of a lower order than formal and aesthetic ones. (139)

Later in the chapter, he paraphrases another CW instructors story regarding a student who wrote a poem about being abused by her Uncle when she was a child. When the instructor attempted to offer constructive criticism of the technical aspects of the poem, the class looked at her with scorn and one of her students suggested that the author should be praised for her courage, not critiqued for her art.

Mayers feels this type of situation

provides an excellent opportunity to raise questions about the function of poetry within a larger culture. Such a poem—a narrative of abuse—can provide an entry point for class discussion geared toward clarifying the uses and purposes toward which such rhetoric might be employed. Students might be asked to consider, for instance, whether there is a significant difference between narrating childhood abuse in a poem—then submitting the poem for consideration in the rhetorical context of the classroom—and talking about such abuse on a daytime talk show or in a support group. Students might be asked to consider the rhetorical effects of submitting such a poem for classroom discussion...[The teacher] might have asked the class members to think critically about their own reactions to the poem. Why were they inclined toward silence or praise? Ultimately, the class could consider the following questions: Is poetry a particularly effective medium for // confession or for narratives of abuse? How does poetry differer from other media in this regard? When someone writes a narrative of abuse in the form of a poem, what social and rhetorical consequences are being sought? In the case of this particular poem, what—if anything—must be done in order for such a consequence to be realized? (147-148)

These last two questions seem to me to the be the heart of Mayers's pedagogical approach. Student creative work is to be considered from a social and rhetorical perspective, and these questions are central to that type of consideration.

Mayers book is helpful in its suggestions of the value of a rhetorical emphasis for CW. His ambitions for institutional reform I have no use for. Which means there are only a few key quotes to pull. A few leads here and there.

Rhetorical emphasis ties into the political consideration of creative production in the U.S., so I think this may turn out to be a useful piece.

Leads

Bawarshi, Anis S. "Beyond Dichotomy: Toward a Theory of Divergence in Composition Studies." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 17.1 (1997): 69-82.

This one looks good. It's an effort to balance ideas that writing comes from an individual mind with ideas that writing is purely socially constructed.

Mayers chapters 1 and 2

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

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

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

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

Anyway, here's his pitch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's it for the first two chapters.



Leads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawson: Chapter 5

So here's where Dawson gets down to theory. He asserts that "Creative Writing needs to answer to the critique of authorship and of the category of literature offered by Theory, rather than simply rejecting this critique as unhelpful or deleterious to literary culture" (161). Then he breaks down CW's responses into three types: integration, avant-garde, and political.

Not much to show for the first type. "Integration" refers to any attempt to integrate Theory and CW. There's a nice comment on the effort to critique poststructuralist theory through CW practice. He says that the "domain of inquiry" of poststructuralist theory "is linguistic and textual meaning, not the creative process. So attempts to illuminate or interrogate it through the practice of writing seem to be beside the point" (162).

He cites a source that gives a rather bad response to Barthes: "It leads Miles to claim that Barthes's theory of the author entering his own death at the moment of writing enables students to understand how writers assume a narrative persona or enter the voice of their characters" (163), which seems to miss the point of Barthes entirely. Might be worth looking up when treating Barthes, although Dawson also cautions that "many writers see the death of the author as the apotheosis and end point of Theory" (164), so too central an examination of Barthes would be a party foul.

Dawson's "avant-garde" response to Theory is essentially a treatment of Australian fictocriticism. Not really my thing, so I'll not comment.

The Political model offers more interesting material, mostly for his citations of Said and Chris Green. He cites Said as critiquing Deconstruction literary analysis as the "new New Criticism," and Green offers a vision of the writing workshop as socially engaged. Cites also the Amato and Fleisher article that you can get to through the "ebr on cw" link at top right.

He summarizes the political approach like so:

...a desire to demystify cliches of literary creativity and reform the writing workshop as a site of political contestation. The focus is not on formal experimentation but on the pragmatics of production and reception within the framework of Cultural Studies. (172)

He cites Marcell Freiman (2001) as someone who feels that Eliot's Modernist view of the relation between creativity and criticism still has some merit. Cites David Galef (2000) on the relationship between CW workshops and identity politics.

Dawson promises his own investigation of politics and the workshop in his conclusion.

He only gets to his own approach to CW and Theory after his survey. He opens this by distinguishing CW from other disciplines by stating that there is "no coherent body of knowledge to pass on" (178), which somehow doesn't sit right with me.

He proceeds:

One way to conceive of Creative Writing as a discipline is to understand that it produces knowledge by an interaction between formalist criticism and practical craft. This is because a practical device of literary composition, such as a point of view or narrative voice (a technical choice made by the writer as to who sees and who speaks in the work), is also a critical tool of analysis (a formalist category for the classification and study of literary works)...If poetics, in Todorov's formulation, negotiates the boundary between literary structure and individual work, or between science and interpretation, then the same negotiation occurs in literature itself. A specific work of literature not only reveals the structure or general laws of literature, but interrogates and expands them. It is a contribution not just to the practical creative art of writing, but to the study of literature as well. (178)

Knowledge [in Literary Studies] is constituted by the interaction of literature and criticism...a dialogic process, a ceaseless interaction between permeable modes of writing. (178)

English is a dialogic engagement between literature and criticism, not in a hierarchical sense of...first-order artistic practice and second-order intellectual apprehension, but in the sense of an ongoing series of interactions between complementary modes of writing. In this case Creative Writing is not necessarily the teaching of writing literature alongside the teaching of writing criticism, but a mode of literary research within the academy. (179)

So he's relying heavily on formalism here, for understandable reasons. And I'd say his treatment of the relationship between formalism and practice is the best I've come across so far. Intuitive and to-the-point. Then he progresses to a defense of the discipline, which I sort of think stretches the point a bit. Not that its not nice to think of poems and novels as "research" equal to that of scholarly work...I guess...Not sure what to make of that, actually.

All in all, the chapter was much less than I'd hoped it would be. Not a thoroughgoing engagement with Theory. Just a "survey" of his three models and then a bit of a formalist hurrah.

Leads:

This is the one I'm most excited about:
Green, Chris (2001). 'Materializing the Sublime Reader: Cultural Studies, Reader Response, and Community Service in the Creative Workshop', College English 64.2: 153-74.

And this is worth looking up:
Said, Edward (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Page 159.

And I suppose I may have to deal with this at some point:
Miles, Robert (1992). 'Creative Writing, Contemporary Theory and the English Curriculum', in Moria Monteith and Robert Miles (eds) Teaching Creative Writing: Theory and Practice, Buckingham: Open University Press, 34-44.

I can't tell if the identity politics guy is worth hunting down or not.

Dawson: Chatpers 1 and 2

I'm skipping some material here, since it's not so relevant to my current project. For future reference, however, Dawson's first chapter offers an interesting examination of the transition from "imagination" to "creativity" in the 17th century. Lots of good leads here for research on creativity. I'll repeat his quoting of Hobbes's Leviathan here, since it stood out to me. Hobbes identifies two forms of imagination:

simple Imagination; as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is Compound; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure (Dawson 23)

Dawson tells us Hobbes thought Compound imagination was the type for poetic invention, and I have to agree. It seems to me that this is precisely where "ideas come from." But I don't really want to run down that rabbit trail just now. Have to revisit all this another time.

His second chapter covers "Disciplinary Origins" which is not quite a full history, but more a set of small histories of "various elements of contemporary Creative Writing theory and pedagogy in their original institutional contexts" (50). He looks at "creative self-expression" as a Romantic notion; "literacy" and the origins of English Composition; "craft" and the proliferation of creative writing handbooks; "literature from the inside," which relates New Criticism and early writing workshops, and finally "Emergence of the workshop." Again, a bit afield of what I'm aiming for, which is an in-depth treatment of theory and CW, although there are a few things in his treatment of "literature from the inside" which might be useful in thinking about New Criticism and CW.

Pgs 75-76 lead me to believe that the relationship between New Criticism and Creative Writing is closer than I thought. They came into being at approximately the same time, and Dawson feels that NC is the sin qua non of CW as it exists today:

the workshop developed and became the dominant mode of teaching writing because of the influence of the New Criticism. Creative Writing became an institutional site for the literary authority of writers, the close scrutiny of individual student manuscripts relied upon practical criticism (76)

Dawson also points out that the major figures of New Criticism were poets first. So how antagonistic to CW could NC really be? I think I need to read up on NC a bit more to get what's going on here.

Leads:

An article by Norman Foester offer his understanding of Creative Writing as an aid to criticism:
(1936) 'Literary Scholarship and Criticism', English Journal coll. edn 25: 224-32.

An article by Allen Tate begins the whole "reading as a writer" deal:
"'We read as writers': The Creative Arts Program and How it is Helpign Freshman Would-Be Authors', Princeton Alumni Weekly 40: 505-6.

I've got some stuff on the New Critics, and will have to delve into it. He mentioned some "heresies" that I hadn't heard of before. "Didactic heresy" and "Heresy of the Paraphrase"... I'll be reading some of this stuff this semester, I expect.

Also, he makes it look like D.G. Myer's book ("The Elephants Teach") is an important source for understanding the connection between New Criticism and CW.


Going forward:

If the relationship between New Criticism and Creative Writing isn't one of the latter lazily appropriating the former without critical reflection but rather is one of the latter requiring the former to take its present shape, then this may not be the way I want to go in my research this semester....still processing this...

Dawson: Intro

Dawson states his orientation as follows:

Creative Writing functions as a discursive site for continuing debate over some of the foundational questions of literary studies: what is literature, what is the nature of the creative process, and what is the nature between the creative and the critical? It is possible, then, to see the pedagogical strategies which underpin writing workshops themselves as responses to these foundational questions. As a result I intend to approach Creative Writing not as a practice (creativity), or as a synonym for literature, but as a discipline: a body of knowledge and a set of techniques for imparting knowledge. (2)

I like his list of questions, as they are the ones I'm interested in, too. He nicely frames the relationship between pedagogy and theory in a way that allows him to read classroom practice as enactments of and/or responses to theory. I'm not sure what to make of the idea of CW as a "body of knowledge." Makes sense in terms of its location in academia, but maybe too limiting...

Dawson says he aims to place CW within a "history of crisis" in English studies:

Creative Writing first developed disciplinary identity in American universities alongside the New Criticism, in mutual opposition to scholarship in English Studies. Writing programmes expanded at the same time as the rise of Theory but became entrenched in opposition to it as a means of retaining this disciplinary identity. This is because Theory called into question the privileged category of literature, the raison d'etre of Creative Writing. (6)

I think there are a few lines worth investigating here, and I wonder how much theoretical work Dawson will be able to do over the course of his book. First, New Criticism is often adopted by folks in CW as the foundation of the workshop and its method of critiquing student work, but this stance is apparently adopted in spite of the "fallacies" of New Criticism, the "Affective" and "Intentional" fallacies actually work against the project of CW, at least as I see it. CW teaches writers to write intentionally and in order to affect readers, right? So if the discipline is to adopt New Critical methods, it must do so carefully, justifying what it is appropriating and its choices about what to leave behind.
Second, there's a boatload of work to do in defending CW against or within Theory. Dawson puts his finger right on the sore here: CW has, by and large, not adapted to the age of Theory. Even calling ours a "post-Theory" age is not sufficient grounds for dismissing the theoretical work of the last several decades, as Dawson explains that "post-Theory" simply means we've entered a phase of incorporating the challenges of Theory into our teaching practices. I'd like to see what I can do to address CW in terms of Theory, and I'll be interested to see how much ground Dawson gains on this issue.

Three questions Dawson wants to ask (very helpful):

(1) instead of asking whether writers need formal training or whether teaching the craft is helpful for writers, and instead of producing more handbooks on the craft of writing, we must ask what are the theoretical underpinnings of the practical writing workshop, what are the assumptions about literature which allow writing instruction to take place; (2) instead of questioning the academic rigour of the writing workshop, we must ask what constitutes knowledge in Creative Writing, and how does work produced by teachers and students in Creative Writing (i.e. their 'research') contributed to knowledge in Literary Studies—and this also means asking what is the function of literature in modern Literary Studies; (3) instead of bemoaning a split between writers and critics we must ask what position of literary authority can a writer assume in the academy, not as an artistic practitioner, but as an intellectual? (6)

'Nuff said. I'll save comment for his answers to these.

The remainder of the intro is taken up by three sections: "Can writing be taught?" "Should writing be taught?" and "The garret and the ivory tower."

The first two questions are common enough in the discourse about CW pedagogy, although I find them rather dull and purposeless. CW is taught, and taught widely, a fact which seems to me to make these questions moot. We should wash our hands of these questions and move on to how to teach CW. Except for one thing. CW is often taught as if it cannot be taught, and so the question of "if" is unfortunately enmeshed with the question of "how." Dawson comments thusly:

The irony of the debate over whether writing can be taught, which was triggered by the rise of Creative Writing, is that most writing courses themselves tend to operate with the notion of innate talent, claiming only that talent can be nurtured in a sympathetic environment: a community of writers where the practical skills of literary craft can be taught, and where students become better readers of literature and better critics of their own work. In fact, it is common for classes in Creative Writing to regulate enrollment numbers by requiring the submission of a folio which displays creative potential. (11)

WTF, right? This seems especially odd to me in light of the fact that Composition Theory has progressed swimmingly past these questions and has established itself within academia to such an extent that you will not find in the pages of CCC or College English anyone wondering about—or even dreaming they should bother defending the discipline against—the question of whether writing can be taught. CW suffers under a burden of excessive, specious privilege. Fiction and poetry must be placed in a special class, apart from the essay, if their instruction is to require its own justification. I say, if writing can be taught, writing can be taught; what do genres matter? But this excessive, specious privilege has a long history, is tied to notions of genius that have held claim on us for thousands of years. So bucking the trend may take some work. I'm personally disposed just to ignore the questions and move on. I think this movement might actually prove to be the better answer. Anyway...

The final section is taken up with the metaphors of the garret and the tower and their relationship to one another. Not much here that catches my interest, so I'll not comment any further.



Leads:

He cites Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh (1988) as a source that critiques CW workshops as failing to respond to the challenge of Theory.