4
This article was downloaded by: [The Aga Khan University] On: 09 October 2014, At: 21:34 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmnw20 Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University Graeme Harper a a University of Portsmouth , UK Published online: 05 Jan 2009. To cite this article: Graeme Harper (2005) Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2:1, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/14790720508668933 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790720508668933 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University

  • Upload
    graeme

  • View
    212

  • Download
    0

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University

This article was downloaded by: [The Aga Khan University]On: 09 October 2014, At: 21:34Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

New Writing: The International Journal forthe Practice and Theory of Creative WritingPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmnw20

Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Researchin the UniversityGraeme Harper aa University of Portsmouth , UKPublished online: 05 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Graeme Harper (2005) Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University,New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2:1, 1-3, DOI:10.1080/14790720508668933

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790720508668933

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in thispublication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsedby Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liablefor any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University

EditorialBuying or Selling? Creative WritingResearch in the University

Recently, I was trying to decide whether to bid on the web auction site eBay fora copy of Anthony Blunt’s Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450�1600 (OUP, 1962). Atough choice: while the price was right, every book that enters a personallibrary takes up space that another might occupy. So did I need this book?

This pressing question � auction time literally nearing by the second �seemed to me to relate to one I’d asked a week earlier in a talk given at theinauguration of the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)research training project ‘Creative Writing Research’, a project that runs from2005 to 2007. That question concerned Plato and whether he was a creativewriter, as well as a philosopher. The question was prompted by his role, in 387BC, as the founder of The Academy, and by the style of much of his work,which has an antecedent relationship with strategies of understanding usedtoday by many creative writers.

In preparing the AHRC talk, I had stumbled on something else too thatsuddenly seemed very relevant. It was a poem composed around 1250 BC by awriter of the Hittite Empire. The Hittite Empire existed from 1900 BC toaround 1200 BC. This poem, hieroglyphics indecipherable by this nonexpert �birds and human figures, arrowheads, sheep, flowers � was written tocelebrate a battle.

Now here was a problem faced previously but suddenly given newdimension, a problem that seemed to be connected with history. And yet, ifit started with history, it certainly didn’t end there. Rather, the questionconcerned the nature of creative writing as a way of investigating the worldand as a field of knowledge that could itself be investigated within auniversity.

Whether Plato, or Wu Cheng’en, the Chinese novelist and poet of the MingDynasty, who studied and wrote at what later became Nanking University,had anything to say on such creative writing research raises a key point. Asdoes the career of Christian Furchtegott Gellert who, abandoning the notion ofbecoming a minister of religion, stayed on at the University of Leipzig from1745, teaching such things as poetry, rhetoric and literary style and writingsuch works as Fabeln und Erzahlungen (Fables and Other Poems ) and the novelLeben der schwedischen Grafin von G———— (The History of the Swedish Countessof G———— ).

The question raised by these personal histories, and paralleled by the manypersonal histories of creative writers in today’s university, is whether creativewriting owns its engagement with the world, and its modes of higher learning

1479-0726/05/01 001-3 $20.00/0 – 2005 G. HarperINT. J. FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING Vol. 2, No. 1, 2005

1

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Aga

Kha

n U

nive

rsity

] at

21:

34 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 3: Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University

concerned with it. Whether, in the crudest terms, it has anything to sell as asubject in the university; or whether, alternatively, it is more of a net buyer ofhigher learning.

Without doubt, part of creative writing’s disadvantage (or, its advantage) isthat it has at its disposal such a wide range of potential approaches to higherunderstanding. There is no reason at all to believe that any one creativewriter’s approach to creative writing will be driven by such words as‘literature’, ‘aesthetics’, ‘communication’, ‘philosophy’, ‘text’, ‘history’, ‘cul-ture’, ‘function’, ‘structure’, ‘emotion’, ‘analysis’, ‘society’ � and the list couldgo on and on. Creative writing, in that sense, is first and foremost a response, amethod of engagement with the world that is defined by the meeting ofpersonal and public circumstance, and that highlights the role of theindividual in determining the measure and style of that meeting. The words,and concepts, that make sense in the composition of any one piece of creativewriting, or in a whole career’s worth, are determined by a set of criteria Iwould group under the term: responsiveness .

Creative writing, as a research subject in the university, must seek toforeground its natural tendency toward a responsive measuring of theappropriateness of any one mode of engagement with the world. Its endproducts are works of the writing arts, but it begins at this point. Even if onlybecause we regularly supervise creative writing research students, we need tobe confident in this approach. But there is more reason to this than that factalone.

While in the first instance this might not seem a radical statement, considerhow different this is to the university’s discourse concerning, say, the study ofLiterature; or, indeed, to the discourse in the study of other subjects such asHistory or Politics or French or Sociology, to take some random academicexamples.

Part of the validity of the research in these subjects is determined by thethorough grounding in a highly structured mode of ring-fenced academicengagement � a set of theoretical and critical positions that have undergoneclose subject-specific scrutiny and are set down with this scrutinised past inmind � the success of the researcher being determined by their ability toemploy one mode or another with more or less aplomb. But creative writing isa subject in which research is first concerned with determining the mode ofhigher learning, before relating this to the mode of presentation. The creativewriter is first, responsive , then responding , then, more often than not, solicitingour response .

The creative writer employs an entirely interrelated creative and criticalsense, determined by personal and public circumstance, to create somethingthey believe to be appropriate to the task at hand. The question of that project’ssuccess � whether it is a poem, a book of short stories, a short play, a novel, ascreenplay, whatever � is determined by the writer and the reader (or, in somecases, the audience) and relates directly back to how successful the creativewriter’s responsive choices have been.

In other words, put crudely again, research in creative writing begins byaccepting that we creative writers are in the first instance net purchasers ofmodes of university higher learning often used singularly and more

2 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Aga

Kha

n U

nive

rsity

] at

21:

34 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Page 4: Buying or Selling? Creative Writing Research in the University

specifically by others, but that the research factor which determines the successor failure of our engagement with higher learning is that concerned withselection, responsive understanding and application. This is the research we‘sell’: the ability to make, from multivalent choice, a coherent response and tocommunicate it effectively.

So did I purchase Blunt’s Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450�1600? Of course,although I was almost outbid by a 95-year-old Scottish ex-policewoman (atleast I like to think that was the identity of my rival bidder, ethmccop095).Sorry, Ethel!

I purchased the book not because I will ever be an expert on ItalianRenaissance art. But because it offers two things I’m seeking. Firstly, specificinformation, to which I’m currently drawn, regarding a culture, a history and aset of people. Secondly, because it is concerned with the engagement of artistswith their environment, and knowledge of this seems a constantly renewablebackdrop to our creative writing research.

If creative writing in the university is not confident of its research methodsthen it fails to address the notion of the university as a place of higher learning,and its own distinguished place within it. The responsive understanding ofcreative writers is both a valid and a valuable way of investigating andinterpreting the world and we need to ensure that we, and others, regularlyrecall this fact.

In this IssueIn this issue we have work from such writers as Jay Ladin and Clare Potter,

Beth Martinelli, Matthew Davey, Lorna Scharer and Joe Mills. There’s an essayby Rob Mimpriss, and work by Gill James on creative writing in otherlanguages. Gill taught French, German and Spanish, mainly in Britishcomprehensive schools, and was a Head of Modern Languages in one ofthese schools for six years. She is currently a PhD student in creative writing.Her article allows this issue to highlight, in a small way, the need to considercreative writing as an international subject in academe. It helps to make plainthat even if this journal is published in English there are many other writers,in other languages, at work generally, and at work certainly in universities.It’s often the case that creative writing in universities is seen largely as anAnglo-American activity. Perhaps its time we revisited this assumption.

This issue also includes an article by Philip Gross, a writer with severalstrings to his bow. Plucking those strings, so to speak, there’s also an interviewwith Philip about his writing and about his work on campus. Finally, this issueincludes an article by the Academy Award# winning writer, film director andproducer, Anthony Minghella. This piece was presented as a talk at the TateGallery in London and is printed for the first time here in New Writing .

Graeme HarperUniversity of Portsmouth, UK

Editorial 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Aga

Kha

n U

nive

rsity

] at

21:

34 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014