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.

Harper and Kroll: Creative Writing Studies

*Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy.* Ed Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD, 2008. Print.

Three useful articles here. Fraser for the value of post-structural theory. McLoughlin for a framing of the project. Hardy for a negative example of the application of the intentional fallacy to the workshop.

Fraser, Gregory. "A Translator's Tale."

Fraser considers himself a translator in the sense that he devotes himself "'translating' the discourses of critical theory into the art and discipline of Creative Writing" (152). Fraser is especially interested in translating post-structural and postmodern theory into CW practice. The primary value of this theory to CW students, according to Fraser, is that is saves them from "parochialism" and/or "provincial attitudes." Understanding sophisticated theory allows authors to write sophisticated creative work.

The value of understanding Foucault's work is that it leads to closer examinations of power relations:

Without a fine-tuned awareness of 'minute and everyday' expressions of power, as well as of larger authoritarian forces in culture (not to mention the continual commingling of the two), Creative Writing students may open their work to criticism of parochialism...[S]killful authorship demands a keen perception of authority in its innumerable forms—in big business and government, to local-level yet no-less-complex exchanges between parents and kids, to 'everyday' (and often seemingly power-neutral) interactions with friends, lovers, and perfect strangers...It is frequently this vision of power that leads students to subtler works of fiction, drama, and poetry. It helps them avoid the narrow view that simply ignores the play of power, and the similarly limited vision that believes power to be located solely in institutions divorced, form, and standing above, the 'everyday'. (157)

Postmodern notions of the de-centering of discourse and the subject help "emerging writers de-essentialize their characters and destabilize formulaic plots" (160).

Lacan for characters:

I find that the Lacanian notion of deferred desire can help students create characters whose motivations are less predictable, more open to surprise. (160)

And Lacan for poetry:

Lacanian theories about selfhood have a special force, as well, for student poets. At the onset, many students who wish to write poems proceed from myths of wholeness about the self Students often write poems to voice what they take to be the essence of an inner being. They seek // to capture some final, genuine truth about an allegedly unique emotion or experience. And these underlying assumptions often produce texts that reach for effect...Lacanian theory can help students recognize not so much the fragmentation of an ultimately unified albeit imperiled self (a modernist conception), but the cultural/linguistic manufacture of the very idea of selfhood (a more postmodern assertion). Such a perspective gives students a different kind of freedom to adopt masks and to explore self-contradictions as generative rather than logically fallacious. Lacan can't help students completely shed the dominant fictions of culture (none of us can do that), but his thinking can encourage students to recognize and tamper with these assumptions in unexpected, artistically vitalizing ways. (160-1)

And Lacan for the creative process:

Students may in fact become more willing, after a little training in Lacanian theory, to let language (rather than a sense of stable selfhood) guide the poetic process. They may allow language to suggest unstable constructions of selfhood, flickers of desire, suggestions of unconscious strings of motivation. This can lead to stronger poems. (161)

Derrida has some value, too:

Derrida's thought can 'free' them [students] from the 'tyranny of the central idea.' Such freedom frequently leads to greater flexibility in characterization, plot development, and language use. By not beginning with a main theme or idea, students avoid working predictably down the page. (162)

I'm not as convinced by this argument. I've yet to see a constructive application of Deconstruction that works. And how could such a thing work? Derrida's thought is liberating for some, since it allows for the undoing of established categories, etc... But I'm not sold on the idea that reading "Structure, Sign, and Play" will allow students to write less predictably, or that whatever they'll come up with instead will be preferable.

McLoughlin, Nigel. "Creating an Integrated Model for Teaching Creative Writing: One Approach."

McLoughlin speaks of "writerly criticism":

At the center I write. Everything stems from that. If I didn't write, I would not be interested in writerly criticism, because to write means one must also criticise in a writerly fashion. Writerly criticism is // different from literary criticism. There is a difference of viewpoint. Literary criticism is concerned largely from the reader's viewpoint. What impact the text has on the reader, how different readers may read a text. While writerly criticism is concerned with that also, it is only part of the story, it is only ever a means to an end. A writer will examine a text critically in order to look closely at the effects it might have on the reader, and at different ways the text may be read, but the motivation is different. The writer may want to add an ambiguity or remove one; a writer may wish to engender a specific effect or set of effects on the reader. Either way, writerly critics are concerned with making the text 'better'. They tend to start from the premise that, this would work better if... (88-89, his ellipsis)

McLoughlin feels that teaching creative writing is, to some extent, teaching students the art and practice of writerly criticism. It allows them to practice such criticism on their own texts. However, he does not feel that they are best taught by workshoping their own texts:

It quickly became apparent that exemplars of good and bad writing worked much better as a way of demonstrating, in practical terms, particularly fine writing or cliche and redundancy etc. in a less emotionally charged atmosphere. It enabled students to criticise and edit the writing of others and by extension their own writing, through using worked examples from other writers that pointed out certain features that students could recognise in their own work or try and adapt to their own uses. (89)

Here's how to pass writerly criticism on to students:

Teaching students to be critical requires balance between bringing out ideas they may have about how a text is working (or not working) and whether the text is good of its type. That // means also teaching them that just because they don't 'like' a text, it does not mean that it is not working, or that there is nothing they can learn from it as a writer. In order to teach this, as great a variety of texts as possible are introduced and the students are asked to interrogate the text from several viewpoints: Does the text work? How does it work? Could it be improved and if so how? What are the constituencies out of which the text is written? What can the student learn from the text as writer?

Later, he expands slightly on these last questions:

How does the author achieve his/her effects? What tropes do they use? What can I learn from these texts as a writer? (92)

The rest of his essay is taken up with the elements that must be taught and the sequence in which they are best taught. It's a good essay and a fine prescription for CW. Strikes me that this along with Shelnutt's article would make for a healthy class discussion, since she provides the best critique yet of CW status quo, and he provides an solid alternative model.

LEAD:
He cites Kolb's model of the writing cycle from Jarvis, P. (2004) *Adult Education & Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice*. London: Routledge Falmer.

Hardy, Nat. "Gonzo-Formalism: A Creative Writing Meta-Pedagogy for Non-Traditional Students"

I was hoping for more from this guy, but (as far as I could tell) he was promoting the traditional workshop in grandiose terms.

Most importantly to me, he exposes his unexamined assumption that the author of a text should be silent while the class critiques his/her work:

On a symbolic level, the workshop...embodies the 'death of the author' notion, because the monological author must restrain any response to criticism until the critical mass has concluded its interpretive, or poly- // phonic, review. For any author, donning the scold's bridle for the duration of workshop dialect is the most difficult, nay emasculating, part of workshop. Verbal castration sounds excruciating, and, for the silenced writer, it is as if he or she must quietly endure a discriminating panel of critics who cast literary judgments on the author's work...Once critical discussion of the creative work has concluded, the author can address his or her live audience to clarify ambiguities, ask questions or, in some cases, beg forgiveness. (103-104)

First of all, it's not possible to comment on this without first addressing Hardy's sexism. How can "any author" feel that something is "emasculating"? Has he ever felt de-feminated? Or, better yet, how can "he or she" endure "verbal castration?" Do his female students have their balls cut off by words? Or is that that all words have testes, and the workshop removes these, neutering each author's language?

In any case, this strikes me as really bad practice and leads to much wasted class time. Gonzo-formalist wasted class time, I guess. Authors are left on their own to measure the distance between intention and effect, rather than the whole class working intentionally and conscientiously on this project together. I guess "Gonzo" is his justification for all the weird, wasteful turns that class discussion can take when it is not directed toward productive criticism of the text. Radical.

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

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.

Harris Article

An elegant, if a bit grumpy, article from Mike Harris over at TEXT offers his thoughts about the current direction of creative writing theory.

Has a nice metaphor for CW practice before the call for theory: "Meat-and-Two-Veg"

Don't we always choose that old recipe, the meat-and-two-veg of creative writing: one part realism, one part romance and a big dollop of neo-classical craft-based formalism? But this is one reason some creative writing academics are calling for more and different 'theory': they either don't accept that 'Meat-and-Two-Veg' is a theory or, if they do, they think it's well past its sell-by date and very bad for us.

Harris has problems with broadening the critical diet, too. Here he is on the interpretation/production issue:

Now, there is a problem here, because literary studies and creative writing are very distinct activities. The former is concerned with interpretation, the latter with creation. Or, if you like, writers produce, critics consume. As a result nearly all literary theory is consumption theory, focusing entirely on the relationship between reader and the text, with little or nothing to say about production.

Teaching theory unrelated to production is, for Harris, simply a waste of time: "precious creative writing teaching-time is wasted in favour of trying logically to explicate...literary theories."

And he finds the current call for CW theory, with its interest in poststructuralism and postmodernism, guilty of "yoking-together of philosophical incompatibles," as when CW scholars take on theories antagonistic to agency and selfhood while still suggesting that individuals can be taught a skill like writing:

To conceive of constructing anything - be it a personality or a poem - requires at least some conception of individual autonomy and free will but in, for example, Derridean poststructuralism both of these can only be the illusory symptoms of equally illusory 'metaphysical' discourse, which is itself a mere epiphenomenon of the ultimately unfathomable linguistic différance or trace that he alleges exists between one word and another without 'origin' or ultimately determinable meaning.

Here's Harris's definition of creative writing theory:

Writing is part of a wider creative process. In this process writing can be individual, collaborative, or both and can incorporate contributions from 'non-writers'. The writing process, in the widest sense, is everything that happens to a work before it is 'finished'.[12] This would include thinking, researching, planning, writing drafts, consciously revising, consciously manipulating the unconscious and being unconsciously driven by it. The study of writing is thus the study of a process, of a constantly moving and changing object, not a fixed field or 'text'.

It's all process for Harris. Which is rather limiting, I think. And in fact, the comp theory that has been done on the writing process has demonstrated that audience considerations are an important part of that process. Which means that theories of production are to some extent informed by theories of interpretation, or should at least be informed by them. Put simply, writers need to know how readers read in order to write for them. Of course, not all readers read like Derrida...but many do read like feminists and post-colonialists and people who work with identity politics. Reader response theory is especially pertinent, I think...anyway.

Here's Harris's list of what we should be doing. Several exciting projects here, and I hope he's getting to work:

Once we have escaped the dazzling tractor beam of inappropriate literary theory, and focused clearly on the writing process now and in history, wide fields of study open up before us. Many have already been cleared by literary scholars working on areas once marginalised in the academy by the dominance of anti-authorial theory - for example: literary biography; attribution studies; the work done by all literary critics when they edit texts and track the changes from one draft to another. The social, psychological and technological differences in historical writing practices are also, of course, significant, as well as the similarities, and could form the basis of legitimate creative writing research (see Larson 1986). Most important of all would be the return to centre stage, through its study in creative writing, of literary aesthetics - poetics - because it is arguably the one indispensible part of our writing process.

The social, psychological and technological differences in historical writing practices—that is the book I want to read next. Get crackin' Harris!

There was another quote I pulled that I have to include, a great, and very practical rebuttal of "readers do the writing":

The notion of the reader essentially 'writing' relies on a redefinition of the two terms that dissolves the essential differences between them; a process by which anything can always be said to be really anything else. For example: I might decide that eating is really cooking and, as long as the rest of my 'discourse community' agree, the redefinition will hold. It's just that, given the actual differences, if we really believe that eating food cooks it, and act upon the belief, then we will probably have to resign ourselves to a raw cold diet, and periodic intestinal disorders.

This is my point about writers needing to be pragmatists at some level. You can't be all spun out in theory and still write unless you are comfortable with a whole series of contradictions inherent in that state of being.

All in all, I like Harris's corrective. He's clearly informed about his Derrida, and I should probably revisit this essay if/when I get deeper into D's work. Harris is helping to point the way forward; he's trying to shake us loose of theory that wasn't meant for writers and is even counterproductive for the writing process. Clearing the ground to start fresh. It's a good instinct.

Some areas CW theory might investigate, based on this and other articles and my own sense of what Harris has left out:

Creativity
Writing Process
Formalism/craft
Rhetorical criticism
Audience studies

That last one, audience studies, means "how readers read." And it is an area that could include the whole history of interpretive theory, but should not be limited to that history. Important help can be gained from other areas. Media studies for example has some interesting things to say about how audiences react to media. And ethnographic research of reading communities. And psych. etc...


Leads from Harris:

Pfenninger, Karl H, and Valerie R Shubik 2001 The origins of creativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Czikszentmihayli, Mihaly 1997 Creativity and the psychology of discovery and invention, New York: Harper Collins

Nelson, Camilla 2008 'Research through practice: a reply to Paul Dawson', TEXT 12.2, October

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."

Anticipating Barthes

I've not read more than "Death of the Author" and a few online secondary sources, but it seems to me that a deeper study of Barthes would be most productive. For folks like Mayers (and Dawson, too, I think) who feel that Theory is essentially theory of interpretation, Barthes presents a compelling alternative. Not that he didn't have a bit to say about interpretation, but he did write quite a bit about writing. And it seems he may provide a way into a more fully developed CWT.

The responses I've seen to Barthes "Death" from CW scholars (Wandor and others) seem to take his title more seriously than the rest of the essay. Yes, he declares the author dead, but what he means by "Author" is something most actual authors don't relate to anyway. His idea of the "scriptor" is something that we should be taking seriously, considering its implications for the writing process and CW pedagogy.

There's a very nice wiki on Roland Barthes, which includes a discussion of some of his key terms, like readerly/writerly texts and author/scriptor. And an excellent bit on "neutral and novelistic writing" that gives some nice leads into his work as it bears on questions relevant to creative writers.

A solid essay on Barthes at third factory gives a great overview of the work, with notes on its relevance to poetry in general and American poetry specifically. Good leads from this one.

From what I glean, if I want to go big on Barthes this semester, I should pick up The Rustle of Language, Writing Degree Zero, and The Pleasures of the Text at minimum. S/Z might need a skim as well.

His distinction between doxa and para-doxa, a distinction I'm not quite clear on yet, promises to be rather useful in discussing the social/political aspects of CW. The doxa is language limited by social pop-culture norms??? And para-doxa is use of language that somehow escapes those limitations. Something like that. Seems like this discussion would be useful for helping writers think about how to write given the social and political aspects of all writing.

Anyway, this could be a good direction to go. Maybe Barthes and Fish this semester. With a quick look at New Criticism? ...still sorting it out.

Dawson: Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

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

He summarizes the political approach like so:

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

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

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

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

He proceeds:

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

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

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

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

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

Leads:

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

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

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

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