NAAL stats

Sheida White, Mark Kutner, Elizabeth Greenberg, Ying Jin, Bridget Boyle, Yung-chen Hsu, Eric Dunleavy. *Literacy in Everyday Life: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy * Washington D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, 2007.

I want to look at this data because I think it shines a light on American literacy in a way theory cannot and because it helps me think about "literature" in terms of its social and political context.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) tested adult Americans on a specific set of literacy skills, which they saw as essential to participation in the economic and political life of the nation. They divided these skills into three categories: prose, document, and qualitative literacies. Prose literacy will be the only category of concern here, since it is the one that most directly relates to the reading of creative work.

NAAL defines prose literacy as follows:

Prose literacy. The knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts. Prose examples include editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional materials. (iii)

Adults who are tested for this type of literacy achieve a sore between 0 and 500. NAAL divided these scores into four "levels" of prose literacy: proficient, intermediate, basic, and below basic. Adults unable to respond to the questions were not scored and were considered "non-literate in English." I've excluded "below basic" since this group is essentially unable to read and understand novels, poetry, or drama in English.

Here is how NAAL defined each level, by skill set and by score:

Basic: reading and understanding information in short, commonplace prose texts. Score: 210–264

Intermediate: reading and understanding moderately dense, less commonplace prose texts as well as summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose. Score: 265–339

Proficient: reading lengthy,complex,abstract prosetexts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences. Score: 340–500 (4)

To give a more precise understanding of what skills were involved at each level, NAAL published a gradation of types of skills, each assigned a score according to its difficulty. For example, whereas below basic readers could not explain the meaning of a metaphor in a narrative, comprehension of metaphor increased in each literacy level:

241 [basic] Explain the meaning of a metaphor used in a narrative.
304 [intermediate] Infer the meaning of a metaphor in a poem.
345 [proficient] Compare and contrast the meaning of metaphors in a poem. (5)

I don't think I'm alone in saying that I consider the ability to compare and contrast metaphors in a poem to be a basic, essential requirement for reading and understanding literary poetry, and that persons not possessed of this skill are not likely to possess the necessary skills to read literary prose either. Consider, for example, this passage from *Ulysses*, which Wayne Booth makes us of in his study *The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction*:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, *maestro di color che sanno*. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the *nacheinander*. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the *nebeneinander* ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, *nebeneinander*. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of *Los Demiurgos*. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

*Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?*

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: *deline the mare*.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. *Basta*! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end. (273-4 in Booth)

Booth recommends we read the passage aloud. He's right. It's lovely to hear. High modernism at its finest. And it is, not, I think, a stretch to say that the skill set require to read such a passage far exceeds the ability to compare and contrast metaphors. One must be much more than proficient to get anything from the passage at all, except, perhaps, a feel for the music. Here's Booth explaining his reaction to the text:

When as a nineteen-year-old I first read the passage, in my often baffled but exhilarated plunge through the novel, I felt completely out-classed. I had never read Aristotle or Aquinas or any other philosopher bald or hairy who grappled with this problem in this way; all I knew was that Stephen is troubled by some mysterious phrase, one that was meaningless to me...And I can remember looking up some of the strange words, and mumbling that mouth-filler: "ineluctable modality of the visible."...One must, in short, become at least a bit philosophical to be able to enjoy the passage at all...//

The possible effects are of course not confined to philosophical inquiry. I am asked, secondly, to mime "being learned."...Even if I can't catch many of the allusions, I will suspect that many allusions are being made—at least that phrase in Italian, if that *is* Italian, is an allusion to *something*, as is the "*Basta!*" Who *is* this "he," this "bald millionaire"? Who or waht is "Madeline the mare?"...

If I happen to recognize the quotation from *King Lear*, I will feel that I am a *little bit* learned, but I'll suspect that there are more allusions that I miss. And what does *nacheinander* mean? I may look it // up, if I happen to recognize that it's German. Or I may simply aspire to become the sort of person, someday, who knows languages and doesn't *have* to look it up. (274-6)

Booth's point it to explain how good literature can inspire a young man to become a better, more intellectual man—philosophical and learned. But we have to remember that he is already a young man capable of reacting so positively due to his early literacy experiences, shaped by the value placed on reading and writing in his family of origin, his early schooling, his experience in the Morman Church, etc. When nineteen-year-old Wayne Booth first read Joyce, he was already functioning at the high-end of proficiency, and Joyce came along to show him that reading could be so much more, that he as a reader could be so much more.

Consider the same passage as read by someone at a low-proficient or intermediate level. There is every chance that he or she will find the passage meaningless. Perhaps the lower-level reader will recognize in it some literary value. If so, he or she may feel intimidated, or challenged, or humiliated, or disenfranchised, or whathaveyou. But he or she will *not* likely feel the same kind or degree of inspiration as Booth. He was at the apex of measurable literacy skill, ready to take wing; average readers, at best, simply recognize a gulf of skill and learning that stands between them and understanding the text.

This raises a line of ethical consideration not taken up by Booth in his reflection on Joyce: What is the meaning of such a text to the general public? How many people are able to react like Booth? Who are they? How do they get to be at their level of skill? How is this skill distributed among readers? By who and according to what criteria? Yes, *Ulysses* is lovely, but for whom?

Here are the NAAL stats on levels of prose literacy across the entire US population:

Below Basic:
1992---14%
2003---14%

Basic:
1992---28%
2003---29%

Intermediate
1992---43%
2003---44%

Proficient
1992---15%
2003---13% (13)

So if 15-13 percent of the US populace is proficient, and a smaller portion of that group is "high proficient," meaning capable of getting something from artists like Joyce or Pynchon or whoever else you want to name that writes difficult prose, then we have to conclude that *Ulysses* is lovely for only a few.

Three hundred million Americans (give or take). Maybe five percent at what I'm calling "high" literacy (which, admittedly, was not a category measured by the NAAL, so I'm guessing here, and I think I'm being generous with that 5%). That still makes 15,000,000 potential Joyce readers in the US. Not a bad audience for him at all, really. Even at 1% (more likely) there's still 3M potential fans for his type of thing. But still, a vast majority excluded. 297,000,000 Americans Joyce leaves out of his conversation.

In her new collection of essays, Elif Batuman asks: "What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?" I want to answer that craft can't help but say something about the world, the human condition, the search for meaning. At all times, and in every way, craft is inextricably linked to such questions. Craft choices are choices from among social conventions, which themselves stand in relation to questions of equity, political questions concerning the relationship of the author to the reading (and non-reading) public. When an author makes craft choices, that author sets the terms of access to their text, including some readers, excluding some others. It is not possible to write an all-inclusive text, but this does not mean that as authors and as educators of future authors we should pretend that craft exists in a vacuum, apart from issues of race and class.

Here are the NAAL figures for average prose literacy score by race:

White
1992---287
2003---288

Asian/Pacific Islander
1992---255
2003---271

American Indian/Alaska Native
1992---254
2003---264

Black
1992---237
2003---243

Hispanic
1992---234
2003---216 (15)

The report acknowledges that "Hispanic" is an overly broad term, and then further breaks down that category by nation of origin, or ancestor's origin. Puerto Ricans were the only group that gained over the period.

Notice that no group is proficient on average (cut off for that level is 340) but, until 2003, only whites were intermediate on average (cut off 265). In 2003, whites were joined by the Asian/Pacific Islander grouping. All other groups are of basic proficiency on average. However, we should also note some significant gains in black and native populations. Inequality remains, and change is happening.

NAAL stats on the percent of adults at proficient or intermediate levels by race:

White
proficient
1992---18%
2003---17%
intermediate
1992---48%
2003---51%

Asian/Pacific Islander
proficient
1992---9%
2003---12%
intermediate
1992---36%
2003---42%

American Indian/Alaskan Native
proficient
1992---5%
2003---10%
intermediate
1992---35%
2003---41%

Hispanic
proficient
1992---5%
2003---4%
intermediate
1992---28%
2003---23%

Black
proficient
1992---2%
2003---2%
intermediate
1992---27%
2003---31% (16)

So, in 2003, when 68% of white adults were at intermediate or above, only 43% of black adults performed at the same level, and only 27% of Hispanics. Again, Puerto Ricans were the only group who gained over the period, with 44% of adults at intermediate or above in 2003.

An author who makes a choice to write complicated, beautiful, demanding prose, is an author who consents to exclude most Americans, including a disproportionate number of non-whites.

And, of course, money is a factor, too:

NAAL stats on average prose score by annual household income

<$10,000---229
$10,000-$14,999---237
$15,000-$19,999---244
$20,000-$29,999---257
$30,000-$39,999---268
$40,000-$59,999---282
$60,000-$99,999---303
$100,000 and up---316 (31)

That, I think, is a very impressive finding. Every increase in income bracket is an increase in prose literacy score.

Authors who aspire to write like Joyce also do so at the cost of excluding minorities and the poor.

The biggest objection I can think of to my reading of these stats is this: why should it be the author's job to set these things straight? Society is unfair, unequal; this is a question of social reform, not artistic integrity. If we were to take me seriously and attempt to write as inclusively as possible, it would mean the death of high literature in English and an impoverishment of our literary culture. Instead of asking authors to compromise their art, why not insist that society promote more minorities and more of the poor to "high proficient" literacy levels? Why not ask authors to help in this effort. In fact, Authors like Joyce, it could be argued, are the best advocates for the highest levels of literacy, since they show us what beauty can be achieved at those levels.

A good objection (if I do say so myself). And I can't disagree with it. Of course we should promote literacy more equitably. Of course we should not do anything to impoverish literary culture. We need Joyce. And we need more readers who can read Joyce. Absolutely.

So let me nuance my position a bit:
Authors who write in English for an American audience send their work out into the social realities of that audience. These authors have choices to make about audience. Who will read their work? What would they like their work to mean, do *do*, and to whom? As they consider these questions, they must have access to clear data about the realities of American literacy to guide them in their "craft" choices. All craft decisions, from genre to "level" of prose, are decisions that shape the potential audience for the work, including some and excluding others. Responsible participation in creative writing literacy requires that authors make their choices purposefully and address both form and content to the included recipients of their work.

The English Lit folks owe it to America to create more Wayne Booths. And especially more black, Latino Wayne Booths. Wayne Booths who are granted a leg-up from poverty.

We CW folks owe it to America to produce more black, Latino, poor James Joyces, yes. But also to create creative writers to are aware of and act as conscious participants in the social realities of American literacy.

Booth citation:
Booth, Wayne. *The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.* Berkley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

bishop and ostrom: Colors of a different Horse

*Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy.* Ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. Print.

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)

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)

Domina, Lynn. "The Body of My Work Is Not Just a Metaphor."

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)

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)

He examines Castiglione's *The Courtier* as an explanation of Renaissance apprenticeship:

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)

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)

He turns to Bakhtin to show that perhaps the early pedagogy has more merit than we might expect:

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)

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)

All in all a compelling argument for an imitative practice, or at least for some responsible ("answerable") engagement with language and its history.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.