Abstract
Charalambous provides a comprehensive review of Creative Writing pedagogies to date with the objective of allowing the reader to consider the assumptions behind the Creative Writing courses they have been taught and pointing to the scarce qualitative research about students’ Creative Writing texts and Creative Writing exercises currently in the field. Three distinct strands in the literature of Creative Writing are discussed: Creative Writing in relation to Literature, to the self (or shift of self) and to research. The first section deals with the conceptual bases of Creative Writing, referring to its relationship to Romanticism, New Criticism, Theory and the workshop. Next follows an analytical account of the literary, the therapeutic, the political and the research conceptions of Creative Writing.
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Notes
- 1.
The study of Creative Writing as a subject is interlinked with its scholarship and the ideologies espoused about writing (studies). By “writing ideologies,” I mean here a particular line of logic followed with regard to the function of writing: for example, we might say that our practice is informed by the ideology that writing is an art form that can be used for raising political awareness or that writing is an art that does not have to have a specific purpose.
- 2.
Interestingly, the concept of ‘creativity accessible to all’ became the symbol for democracy and ‘capitalist productivity,’ during the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, in a post-industrial narrative, the ethos of a creative class is an argued ‘force for economic growth’ (Dawson 2005, p. 46; see also Webb 2012 on a further critique). This aspect of “artistic spirit,” then, by the name of “creativity,” might be perceived both as a mode of social expression and suppression.
- 3.
The Ancient Greek connotations to ‘mimesis’ are a matter of debate, however.
- 4.
Attesting to the complex interstices of links in literary theory, New Criticism, which arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is connected to Formalism, defined as the study of the literary text concerned with the purposes of the text focusing on form, not external influences (Waugh, 2006, see pp. 212–22, and pp. 165–75). It arose as a reaction to Romanticist theories of the individual writer and genius, originating from Russian formalism, and afterward Anglo-American New Criticism (ibid.).
- 5.
It is (ironically) defined as ‘a building in which manual labour took place’ (Dawson 2005, p. 81).
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Charalambous, Z. (2019). Why Does It Matter How Creative Writing Is Taught?. In: Writing Fantasy and the Identity of the Writer. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20263-7_2
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