Key Issues in Creative Writing (New Writing Viewpoints) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847698468 ISBN 13: 9781847698469

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Key Issues in Creative Writing explores a range of important issues that inform the practice and understanding of creative writing. The collection considers creative writing learning and teaching as well as creative writing research. Contributors target debates that arise because of the nature of creative writing. These experts - from the UK, USA and Australia - specifically examine creative writing as a subject in universities and colleges and discuss both the creative knowledge and the critical understanding informing the subject and its future. Finally, this volume suggests ways in which addressing current issues will produce significant disciplinary knowledge that will contribute to the success of creative writing in current and future academic environments.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dianne Donnelly, PhD, is the author of Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (2011) and the editor of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010). She is a regular contributor to the theory and pedagogy of creative writing and a frequent presenter at CCCC and AWP on creative writing pedagogy. She is on the editorial board for New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and Writing Commons, referees for the online peer-reviewed journal TEXT, and teaches writing at the University of South Florida.

Graeme Harper, DCA PhD, is Professor and Director of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan. He has held professorships in the UK, USA and Australia, is an honorary professor in the UK and the Editor-in-Chief of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. He recently also published On Creative Writing (2010), and is currently working on Creative Writing Challenges. A winner of the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Aust.), and a Commonwealth Scholarship, he is Editor of the New Writing Viewpoints book series.

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Key Issues in Creative Writing

By Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2013 Dianne Donnelly, Graeme Harper and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-846-9

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Contributors, 
Introduction: Key Issues and Global Perspectives in Creative Writing Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper, 
Part 1, 
1 Reshaping Creative Writing: Power and Agency in the Academy Dianne Donnelly, 
2 Hey Babe, Take a Walk on the Wild Side – Creative Writing in Universities Mimi Thebo, 
3 Creative Writing Habitats Graeme Harper, 
4 Beyond the Literary: Why Creative Literacy Matters Steve Healey, 
5 To Fill with Milk: or, The Thing and Itself Katharine Haake, 
6 Creative Writing Research Graeme Harper, 
7 Creative Writing Knowledge Dianne Donnelly, 
Part 2, 
8 Teaching Toward the Future Stephanie Vanderslice, 
9 Holding On and Letting Go Indigo Perry, 
10 Programme Design and the Making of Successful Programmes Building a Better Elephant Machine: A Case Study in Creative Writing Programme Design Nigel McLoughlin, 
The Future of Graduate Studies in Creative Writing: Institutionalizing Literary Writing Patrick Bizzaro, 
Conclusion: Investigating Key Issues in Creative Writing Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Reshaping Creative Writing: Power and Agency in the Academy

Dianne Donnelly

Terry Threadgold urges that 'the future success of higher education institutions depends on universities learning to re-imagine themselves regularly'. This chapter interrogates what this 're-imagining' might mean for creative writing in the academy, noting that the future success of creative writing depends on the discipline's agency – on the ways in which creative writing goes forward, on the ways in which its practitioners intentionally design their coursework and programs and the ways in which creative writing programs stay attuned to their students' needs, to the modern economic critical academy and to their community coalitions. This chapter urges the ways in which creative writing (administrators/teachers) can visibly impact their students and the academy through (1) hybridization and cross-pollination, (2) new teaching formations and directions, (3) more flexible and appropriate career pathways for graduate students, and (4) through the building of stronger public and academic communities to include a stronger relationship with government bodies as well as more fully-integrated international partnerships and associations.

Everything we do is embedded in time, and time changes not only us, but our point of view as well Margaret Atwood, 2005: xiii–xiv

Looking back on some of the essays she's written, Margaret Atwood (2005: vii) reflects on whether she'd write them differently today or whether she'd write them at all. She says, 'One year's prophecy becomes the next year's certainty, and the year after that, it's history ... We're always looking over our shoulders, wondering why we missed the clues that seem so obvious to us in retrospect'. Creative writing's story in the academy tends to mimic this reflective cycling. For years, the discipline promoted literature for its own sake in the US until its intersection with postwar program expansion and rising enrollment. Patrons of university subsidies and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA, n.d.) funding made available hiring opportunities that tripled what is available in today's job market. In the eighties, the road traveled by creative writing promoted the production of writers and teachers until the 1990s, when once again, creative writing situated at a crossroad; this new position no longer in sync with a favorable marketplace. Looking over our shoulders, we can see that as a discipline, creative writing had been part of a fractured community signaled by its long history of subordination to literary studies, its lack of academic status and sustaining lore, and its own resistance to reform. These factions had kept creative writing from achieving any central core in the academy.

Still, Allan Tate predicted back in 1964 that the discipline 'is here to stay, at least for a long time' (p. 181), and part of the catalyst that not only sustains creative writing today but also propels it forward, is its mobility and its transferrable and generative properties that intercross disciplinary boundaries. Yet, perceptions of creative writing as a significant contributor to the academy waiver even in light of the discipline's growing student enrollment and degreed programs in the US, UK and Australia and even in view of its competence as a substantiated site of knowledge. With the perspectives we've gained by considering the past and the crossroads we've encountered, we can (1) shed new light on the history that informs our pedagogies and writing practices, (2) reshape, as needed, the space of creative writing, (3) move the discipline forward within the modern economy and critical academy, and (4) respond as champions for the discipline as proactive rather than reactive agents of change. Responding as champions of our discipline means that although we may have fewer choices given the direction of the economy and the inevitable changes that impact the academy, we can also focus our attention on the opportunities that exist for creative writing to succeed in our many different academic environments and administrations.

Terry Threadgold (2011) reminds us that 'The levels of government scrutiny we are facing, along with the funding crisis, will be drivers for change'. He suggests that 'future success of higher education institutions will depend on universities learning to re-imagine themselves regularly'. This chapter suggests that we can visibly impact our students and our academy through (1) hybridization and cross-pollination, (2) new teaching formations and directions, (3) more flexible and appropriate career pathways for graduate students, and (4) through the building of stronger public and academic communities to include a stronger relationship with government bodies as well as more fully-integrated international partnerships and associations.

Hybridization and Cross-Pollination

Foucault (1980: 112) sets up a dichotomy related to the conditions of space when he says that space can be a theater of operation for power dynamics because of competing ideologies, but it can also be a sector of freedom which is unconstrained by barriers. Power dynamics come into play in the academic environment when research monies and employability factors influence administrative priorities. Although creative writing enrollment numbers may prove favorable to administrators, low teacher-student ratios and other associated overheads impact operational costs. Moreover, the discipline's effective practice and academic value has been somewhat dissociated from the university and less understood by administrative leaders who focus more attention on programs that achieve critical mass.

However – as research universities begin to respond more flexibly to the changes in the economy's and society's demand for certain skills and knowledge, as they react to the growth in the media-related sector, and become more aware of the 'seismic shift now underway in much of the advanced world from the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age' to the kind of creativity associated with the 'inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities ... of the Conceptual Age' (Pink,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847698468
• ISBN 13: 9781847698469
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 210
• Herausgeber: Donnelly Dianne, Harper Graeme
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland