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The Rise of Creative Writing

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Futures for English Studies

Abstract

In The Elephants Teach, his analysis of the complex history of Creative Writing as a university subject in the United States, D. G. Myers remarks that Creative Writing achieved its ‘full growth’ as a discipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s ‘when the purpose of its graduate programs (to produce serious writers) was uncoupled from the purpose of its undergraduate courses (to examine writing seriously from within)’ (2006, p. 149). Myers’s argument (in context) is persuasive, though the binary starkness of his proposition inevitably fails to anticipate the increasingly vocational orientation of many undergraduate programmes (with their emphasis on skills appropriate to employment in the ‘creative industries’) and the research orientation of many PhD programmes (with their aim of producing serious academics).

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Authors
  1. Andrew Cowan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Open University, UK

    Ann Hewings , Lynda Prescott  & Philip Seargeant ,  & 

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© 2016 Andrew Cowan

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Cowan, A. (2016). The Rise of Creative Writing. In: Hewings, A., Prescott, L., Seargeant, P. (eds) Futures for English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-43180-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-43180-6_4

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-68286-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43180-6

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