the thinking thus far

My reading thus far is helping me reevaluate where I stand on this project. Rethinking what I want to do, as always.

Seems that "creative writing theory" is part of a larger category: "creative writing studies."

The basic question of creative writing studies is this: "What sorts of academic work are appropriate to this discipline?" It's a question that is of much concern in the present conversation, and theory is one possible answer.

But CW theory is new. So it's unsure how to go about theorizing. Should it draw on comp theory? Or literary theory? Or chart its own course? There are voices representing each of these directions. Seems to me CW theory can, and should, do all of these. It would be silly not to draw on comp theory, since they've been asking the relevant questions for some time now. But do we start over and do "process" like they did 30 or 40 years ago? Or do we catch up and do the sort of identity-politics influenced social critique stuff? Or both? Probably both. And it would be silly not to draw on literary theory, even if it is "interpretive" instead of "productive," since lit theory has been asking relevant questions for a long, long time. But what to take from lit theory? Only formalism? Post-structuralism, too? Both again? And it seems important that we chart our own course, too, since we are productive rather than interpretive, and there must be some important distinctions between us and comp folk...or are there? We can at least bring an extra emphasis on creativity and investigation questions of inspiration, etc.

So in short, CW theory has got way too much to do. It has to draw on two existing academic traditions and find its own voice and interests. This is a lot to accomplish all at once.

And more than I can handle in a semester. Or even in a Masters Thesis...

Things have been broadening, and now I need to narrow them down. I want to do something with comp theory, with literacy, with formalism and with post-structuralism, but not all this semester. My final project will need an extensive literature review, so maybe that's what I'm working on this semester. This is my chance to read all this stuff, so... I guess that's it. A big lit review, and if I get a chance, I'll address New Criticism and why it doesn't work for the workshop, and then if I really have loads of extra time, I'll do the other formalisms and why some of them might have something to offer.

That the thinking thus far.

Bishop: Released into Language

Bishop, Wendy. *Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing*. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990.

Bishop's book focuses on bringing comp theory, especially comp theory that focuses on the writing process, over to creative writing pedagogy. She's best for her leads, which are all 70s and 80s stuff. I think comp theory moved on from process, but I suppose there are still some process folks around. I'll need to look for more current stuff in addition to her leads.

I guess this means that CW people like Harris who are calling for process theory are about 30-40 years behind comp theory? Or, at least, they are doing what comp people were doing 40 years back.

She distinguishes between the "traditional" and the "transactional" workshops. Traditional focus on text, transactional on process.

She sums up the comp research like so:

Cognitive research helps writing teachers understand the basic writer as someone who is rule governed (generally inappropriately so), who has trouble imagining audiences other than herself, and who has inflexible revising and writing strategies and an underdeveloped sense of the composing process. Successful writers are...able to decide upon audience and to tailor the developing text to audience demands and rhetorical demands. The successful writer not only has flexible composing and revising strategies but also has a wealth of successful, previous writing experience to draw on, enabling her to make and adjust writing goals to suit a particular writing situation. And it is this fluency, flexibility, and sense of a writer as someone who writes that can be highlighted in the creative writing workshop. (22)

That's all I got from her. The rest was options for classroom exercises and methods of grading student work.


Leads:

Looks like I can probably start with Flowers and Hayes
Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. 1981. "A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing." *College Composition and Communication* 32:365-87.

...actually I think Hayes had an article in our Literacy book that developed that model further...

For critics/extensions of process she cites "structural social theorists":
Pat Bizzell (1984) "What happens when basic writers come to college" --this one was a presentation as it turns out.

Marilyn Cooper (1986) "The Ecology of Writing." College English 31: 134-42.

Kenneth Bruffee (1984) "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind." College english 46: 635-52.

these folks say "composing does not occur only for an individual...or in the head...but also in complex social settings which affect the ways in which both basic and professional writers write" (23)

and ethnographic studies:
Heath (1983) *Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms*. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984) *Language Stories and Literacy Lessons.* Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.

She says these ones "let us see that composing is transactional, negotiated by writers within households, schools, and communities, and that social/biographical factors also affect the writing of any individual" (23)

Says these two have more on these theories:
Faigley, Lester. 1986. "Competing Theories of Process." *College English* 48 (October): 527-42.

Berlin 1987 *Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.* Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
----- 1984 Writing Instruction in 19th Century American Colleges.

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

questions

Questions on the relationship of Author to Authorship

What is an author? What does it mean to be one? Is "author" even the right word for what we're talking about or is there a better term? What sort of power does this position have, what sort of *authority*, if any? How is such power best used? What does it mean to call oneself an author? Why would anyone do so? What sort of people desire to attain this position? What are their motives? Is authorship a democratic institution, available to all, or is it an elite post, attainable only by a few? If democratic, what value does it have to call oneself an author? If elite, what qualities must one have to become one of these few? Are these qualities obtainable by anyone or are they a "gift"? What do we mean when we say that we are authors? Why do we say it?


Questions on the relationship of Author to Text

What do authors do? How? How can they do it better, and how could one learn to do what authors do? What is the nature of the writing process? What qualities make for a more effective execution of that process? Exactly what sort of "control" does an author exercise over a text? Conversely, how does a text exercise control over an author? Do authors write texts or vice versa? Similarly, do authors *make* texts or vice versa? To what extent do other texts influence authors as their write their own? What can authors do to make a "good" text? A "better" text? Is there such a thing? How would one—how *does* an author—decide whether a text is "good" and how to go about making it "better"?


Questions on the relationship of Author to Reader

What are the parameters of this relationship? Since this relationship is mediated by a text, how does that mediation affect the nature of exchange between these parties? Who exercises power over whom? How? To what extent? How much of a reader's experience can an author reliably control or predict? What sorts of ethical decision and responsibilities does author owe to reader? Why is "reader" singular? Shouldn't we be talking about "readers" in the plural, and how does this plurality alter the way we think about this/(these) relationship(s)? What do readers read and why? How can they be best addressed by authors who want to achieve a particular end or effect?


Questions on the relationship of Author to World

What does it mean to be an author in this world? What do authors do? What sort of effect does this have on the world? What responsibilities does an author have to the world? To what extent does the world shape an author and his/her work? Is the author a free agent, solely responsible for his/her actions, or is the author a conduit for the world, which expresses itself through the author? Who gets to be an author anyway and how? What powers and institutions act as gatekeepers for this position and what is their agenda? How is the status of authorship related to identity and identity politics?


Questions on the relationship of Author to Language

Who is in charge here? Is there any author outside of language? Is language an author's material, like a painter's oil and canvass? Or is language an elusive force that cannot be fully controlled, one that even takes over the composing process at times? Can language refer to anything outside of itself? If so or if not, what implications does this have for the author's task? If we think of language as necessarily social and society as necessarily political, how ought the social and political nature of language inform our thinking about authors and authorship? How ought it to inform the way authors go about the act of writing?

map

This is my little map of the elements of literature. I've tried to make it as general and uncontroversial as possible, but of course it's impossible to avoid some amount of controversy. The assertion that there are "elements" in something called "literature" that can be "mapped" already raises eyebrows somewhere in academia. Likewise, that there should be only five elements, or only *these* five, causes a new set of problems for some folks. But I think for the purposes of general conversation about the things that are important to include in our discussion of literature, this map serves as at least a rough guide to the territory. Present are Author, Text, Reader, World, and Language. I'm using the term "World" here in the most general sense; it is the Great Thing that contains all the other, lesser things. In this case, I'm featuring a few of these lesser things as of particular interest to theories of literature, namely authors, who write texts; texts, which are written and read; readers, who read texts; and language, which is the medium in which authors write, texts are composed, and readers read.

For some academics, "World" is just another aspect of Language, which contains all things. All the things we talk about, at least. And for these critics, my map seems to make a poorly articulated argument against the centrality of language. I've made "World" and "Language" separate entities, with "Language" subordinate to "World." In other words, I seem to have made a claim that there is an objective world outside of language, which contains language as one of its parts. I do not mean to make such an argument, but I also do not wish to make the reverse argument, that language is all in all and that there is nothing outside of the "Text." I could have drawn my map so that language was on equal footing with the world, encompassing the lower half of the large oval, but this would only have created new problems by creating a central opposition between "World" and "Language" as if these were clearly distinguishable and irreconcilable.

To some extent, the category "World" is also my way of including other "elements" that I haven't featured here. Time, for example, is an aspect of "World" that plays an important role in literature, especially since author and reader may exist centuries apart, a gap traversed by the text. Race, gender, class, Capital, History, and technology are other elements I've not featured, but which constitute important aspects of "World." To give "Language" equal billing with "World" would have given it priority over these other elements and therefore privileged post-structural theories of language over other, equally important academic work.

For English speakers, there is an implied directionality from author to text to reader, since we read from left to right. However, I did not draw arrows along this line because this is not a unilateral relationship. All elements have some degree of influence upon all the others, so that, if I had started drawing arrows, I wouldn't have known where to stop.

The value of this map is that it gives some orientation for understanding the emphases of various theories. New Criticism emphasizes only the text, and makes an effort to exclude all the other elements. Deconstruction emphasizes language to the exclusion of all other elements...or to the absorption and dissolution of all other elements, which is more or less what is meant by "Nothing is outside of the Text." Language is everything. Some theories take more than one element into account. Mimetic theories emphasize the relationship between text and the world. Reader-response criticism focuses on readers and the world, conceived of as a world of other readers forming interpretive communities. And some theories have a particular interpretation of how all the elements work together; Rhetorical theories, for example, understand literature as something authors do with language in texts in order to persuade readers and thereby influence the world.

Creative writing theory is meant to address the needs of authors, to help them better understand what it is that they do and the means by which they do it. For this reason, it will be important to gain an understanding of all these elements from the perspective of the author. What is the author's relationship to the text? To readers? To language? To the world? To authorship, even? These are the most basic questions of creative writing theory, and upon investigation of them, theorists can expect to discover further questions that concern matters of writing practice and pedagogy, matters of practical concern to authors who write and teach.

Investigation of these questions will also necessarily encounter theories of literature (and theories applied to literature) that are written from perspectives other than that of the author. Most Theory, in fact, is theory of interpretation, written from the perspective of the reader. These theories have various ways of addressing the author and thinking about the role of authorship in literary "meaning."

Theories that exclude the author or challenge the status of the author in some way are theories that creative writing theory ought to address as challenges and opportunities. These theories challenge creative writing theory to justify its existence and the validity of its project. In this way, they also provide an opportunity for creative writing theory to strengthen its claims and clarify its position on the author's relationship to the elements of literature emphasized by these challenging theories.

Theories that do not exclude the author still generally understand the author from the perspective of the reader, and so creative writing theorists must exercise caution when appropriating these theories, taking care to reevaluate their treatment of authorship.

Of course, creative writing theory, while drawing on the work of existing theories, need not limit itself to the work of interpretive theorists. Creative writing theory can begin with its own observations of the experience of literature from an author's point of view. It can also draw on work in other fields, such as the work of composition scholars the testimony of working writers about the nature of what they do, and psychological and philosophical treatments of creativity.

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."