ASAL Canberra 2009

Presentation by Carol-Anne Croker

PhD candidate and research assistant

Swinburne University of TechnologyFaculty of Higher Education, Lilydale

Saturday July 11th 2009

Creative Writing Courses in the Academy: has this impacted on the popularity of Australian Literature study in Universities or sales of Australian titles in bookstores?

Printed April 19, 2009 06:03pm AEST

On a thriving literary culture

THE FORUM: Michael Heyward | December 20, 2008

Article from: The Australian

COPYRIGHT tells the whole story of our thriving

literary culture.

Without it there would be no recognisable book

trade, royalties for writers or investment in the skills

ofpublishing: editorial, rights, design, production,

marketing, publicity.

Copyright, licensed territorially, allows writers to

authorise editions by country or language. It allows

booksellers to form a fair marketplace. When you buy

a new Australian book in a local edition you are

contributing to a high domestic royalty for the writer.

The US, Britain and Canada use similar rules to

reward writers.

Our rules are cleverer than theirs. If a book is not

available here within 30 days of its publication

overseas, the bookseller is free to parallel import it, to

ignore territorial copyright. This principle of use it

or lose it forces publishers to make foreign books

available promptly. It guarantees an Australian

territory for Australian writers because we publish

first. It stops royalty-free foreign editions of

Australian books being dumped here.

The 30-day rule, the subject of an inquiry by the

Productivity Commission, is the most efficient and

creative territorial regime in the world. It truly

balances the demands of commerce and culture, the

rights of creators and consumers.

Illustration: John Spooner

Writing off an industryMichael Heyward March 24, 2009Changes to territorial copyright don't add up for our authors and publishers.

THERE'S a lot at stake in the world of books and writing and publishing. Our industry is blossoming. We're selling great books at home and exporting our writers in unprecedented numbers. We have a superb retail environment, with a dynamic independent sector, and a competitive printing industry that generates significant numbers of skilled jobs. There's never been a better time to be a writer or publisher in Australia.Much of this energy has been harnessed by our "use it or lose it" territorial copyright regime — the 30-day rule introduced in 1991 that keeps in balance the interests of consumers and producers by compelling local publishers to publish a book within a month of its appearance anywhere in the world.

Once upon a digital time

Liz PorterJune 21, 2009 - 7:24AM

MOST evenings Mandy Brett curls up on her couch to read a new

Australian novel on her Sony e-reader, an electronic device that stores

up to 350 books and allows her to "turn the page" with a flick of her

finger. The senior editor at local company Text Publishing, Brett, 46,

switched to e-reading 18 months ago because lugging manuscripts

home was giving her a sore back.

A self-described "gadget head", she is already onto her second e-

reader, having recently upgraded to a newer version of the device. If

she's stuck waiting for a friend in a cafe, she'll whip out her iPhone

and read a few pages of Let the Right One In, a novel by Swedish

writer John Ajvide Lindqvist.

For Brett, the e-reader means work. When she reads for fun, she sticks

to paper books. The current embryonic state of Australian e-publishing

makes it easy for her to keep her dual reading lives separate. As yet,

she says, there are still too few local e-books available for download.

While all major Australian publishers, including Text, are preparing for

digitalisation, the only locals already selling e-versions of their titles

are Pan Macmillan and Allen & Unwin. The only book chain marketing

them is Dymocks. And the only bookshops where would-be customers

can inspect an e-reader are Dymocks' main Sydney store and

Melbourne's Reader's Feast.

If Brett were in the US, she could have a $US359 Kindle - a wireless e-

reader launched by Amazon.com in late 2007.

The Ghost and the machine: Creative Writing and the Academic System Andrew TaylorTEXT Vol 3 No 1 April 1999

When relativity, diversity, plurality, internationality, multi-racialism and - let's breathe the dreaded word that was once always on our lips - multiculturalism, become too prominent in the public domain, when they look like influencing public policy, then there are those who will reach for their gun - even if (one hopes) only metaphorically...

1. The problem with Universities

2. The problem with English Departments

English Departments or their equivalents today have come a long way from that. In their various ways, they have been in the forefront of changing attitudes towards a singular truth. If one believed everything one reads in the letters to the editor in some of our newspapers, English Departments (or their equivalents) are guilty of everything from the inability of everyone in the Australian community except the letter-writer to construct a grammatical sentence, to the current alleged breakdown in moral order and the ensuing social chaos.

3. The problem with Literary Studies

... the Canon of Eng Lit was another example of a longing for the singular. Leavis's famous introductory sentence to The Great Tradition was just an extreme way of expressing it: "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad…" Leavis [1954]

4. The problem with Creative Arts in Universities....

The Machine referred to in my title is not - as some of you may be thinking - the University. But the Machine exists within the University...... By "The Machine" I mean an intensification of that unitary mindset which has served Western society quite well for so many centuries but which has had to be defeated, subverted, overthrown or seduced into complicity whenever a significant advance has taken place. And in this sense Universities in Australia today are increasingly machine-orientated. In such a context, the Ghost - largely in the shape of the Humanities but most pertinently in its protean guise as the Creative Arts - has to be especially wary and wily ...

5. The problem of Creative Writing disciplines...

... Creative Writing is only one part of many universities' Writing programs... Creative Writing – like the other Creative Arts generally - is a relative newcomer to the university context and will not be so easily assimilated to this growing sense of anti-complexity which I have called The Machine. By its very diversity and plurality, by the way it draws its vitality from the conflicting and the irresolvable, creative writing is a profound challenge to it. Furthermore, it refuses to fit into the job-oriented ethos of so much current university thinking about education - the Machine-made track to a job mentality.

6. The problem of equivalency.

The OECD definition of research reads as follows: Research and experimental development comprises creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including the knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock to devise new applications. (32) The adoption of the notion of research equivalence does not require…any re-definition of research as it is commonly understood by the universities, the ARC [etc]…Rather it extends the definition to accommodate the work of artists/researchers… whose research and research equivalent activity currently receives limited recognition, or no recognition at all. (46)

7. The problem of university research...

Paul Dawson Writing Programmes in Australian Universities: Creative Art or Literary Research?TEXT Vol 3 No 1 April 1999

There are three ways in which the term research is defined and used in the university. The first is research as the preliminary gathering of material; through libraries and archives, interviews, lab tests, empirical observation, statistical and data collection, etc.

This is the most common understanding of the term. Now of course this sort of research is carried out by writers. We can all recognise a well-researched book, or a critically informed book.

The problem here, of course, is that this sort of research is not presented in the same way as scientific discoveries, or even the scholarly literary review. It is not verifiable by reference to sources because the material is put to fictive rather than scholarly ends. It is not an appeal to fact, but a selective aesthetic deployment of fact.

Nonetheless, there are ways in which the final product not only uses, but actively interrogates and therefore bears back upon the initial research.

8. The problem of creative product as research

9. The problem of Creative Writing and ‘elite’ readership

Regardless of whether writing programmes are housed in departments of English, schools of Creative Art, or communications degrees, the specific discourses which form knowledge in the discipline of Creative Writing belong to literary studies. One always writes from within an unconscious or intuitive theory of literature, even if that is a theory of the divine muse or the inner voice. And the work produced will always relate to existing traditions or genres, even, or especially, if it is in violent reaction to them.

10. The problem of ‘common’ readership

A work of literature does not mimetically represent the world or a fictional world. It is constructed out of, and bears the linguistic traces of, discourses which operate within and organise social relations. These discourses are formed in the fictive text by being pressed into tension with a second layer of language governed by the formal conventions of craft.At the level of content the fictive work that students produce has the potential for unlimited interdisciplinary exploration and cultural commentary. A novel about sexual harassment, for instance, can not only engage with, but contribute to feminist theory and an understanding of gender relations.

The devil in the detail – dualism and dichotomies

There is a long tradition of writer-critics, from Ben Jonson to T.S. Eliot, providing a theoretical defence for their literary creations, or a pre-emptive critique of their work. George Watson calls this prefatorial criticism, exemplified by John Dryden, the "father of English criticism" in Dr. Johnson's words.

This tradition was not just a matter of writers creating the taste by which they were to be enjoyed, however; it was also the formation of an intellectual inquiry alongside their writing, and, as many commentators have pointed out, it is the base from which English literary criticism developed.

Marcelle Freiman: What do students learn when they do creative writing?

http://www.aawp.org.au/files/u280/freiman.pdf

Perceived conflicts between creative arts and academic research have focused on a distinction between creativity – ‘organic’ and difficult-to measure or assess – and ‘research’, as a model of rational, measurable scientific understandings.

This conflict is based on the devaluing of creativity within existing academic structures; the denial of the ‘circuitous path of creative and critical researchacross all disciplines’, which links creativity with critical, if not with ‘factual, scientific’ thinking (Brophy 1998)

What is our raison d’être ? How can we justify our positions in the Academy?

TEXT Editorial TEXT Vol 11 No 1 April 2007

“...the following letter to the editor appeared in the 'Your View' column of the Weekend Australian Review:

Laurie Hergenhan's column on Australian literature (Review, March 10-11) was thoughtful and accurate. However, I believe some blame must rest on writers. Recently a friend gave me a bundle of Ozlit magazines, which I stacked by my bedside table, dipping into them over the midnight watches. The self-conscious cleverness, coupled with the arrogance of inaccessibility (certainly with the poetry) was palpable. As far as I'm concerned, the Ozlit problem is twofold. On the one hand, profit-driven publishing has meant no time to notice, let alone nurture, new talent, and on the other there are too many wannabes who couldn't give a stuff about a readership beyond their mates. I know there are good Australian writers out there. The problem has more to do with creative writing courses encouraging a cult of authorship fuelled by ego rather than talent.

Ian McFarlaneBeauty Point, Wallaga Lake, NSW

(Weekend Australian Review March 24-25, 2007: 2)

Creative writing teachers and researchers are not typical academics in that many of us publish for wider readerships than peer-reviewed journals. We are engaged in a 'new humanities', according to Paul Dawson (2005). We are also involved in varying degrees as public intellectuals in a climate where well- known authors are celebrities participating in a growing range of writers' festivals and public performances...

It also needs to be said that our courses aren't necessarily designed to produce published writers. We are producing better readers, contributing to the education of good teachers and so forth, as well as facilitating the work of 'new' writers.

Phillip Edmonds: Interrogating creative writing outcomes: Wet Ink as a new model. TEXT Vol 11. No. 1. April 2007

So does either Literary studies or Creative Writing disciplines increase the interest in and sales of Australian books?

Perhaps by looking at the Australia Council’s final report: Economic Analysis of Literary Publishing in Australia (September 2008), we can identify that the Australian literary industry is reasonably healthy or at least economically valuable.

However, can we assume that literary publishing correlates with the genre of Literature as proposed by Australian Literary studies?

It is my contention that by writing and reading Australian texts in either Oz Lit courses or CW courses, supports the publishing industry in this country.

However, can we reflect on how many Australian texts need to be read to pass a Literature major in our Humanities/Arts/Creative Writing degrees? (Look within your own courses).

And as has been pointed out in several presentations at this Conference should we be devaluing the idea that ‘common’ reading, (which could be considered as reading primarily for pleasure rather than intellectual play of ideas as in ‘elite’ reading) is/ should be less privileged?

Can revaluing this broader reading imperative create a space for ‘non-literary texts in the Academy and more broadly within the broader Australian reading communities? My contention is “yes”.

Is this reflected in the popularity of genre texts within the Australian “publication market”? Jason Ensor and Katherine Bode have identified precisely this through their interrogation of the AusLit database, in the current special issue of JASAL.

The unification principle.

More research needs to be done to answer this question. At this stage I know several Industry insiders (commercial publishers and Writers’ Centre manuscript assessors) who have spoken of a better quality manuscript making it “off the slush pile”.

For this we can thank the ‘unpaid labour of publishing’; the Doctoral and Masters supervisors, for doing the ‘grunt’ work of structural and line editing before the manuscripts are even submitted.

After all our artefacts must be deemed publishable as one measure of academic competency in our discipline.

If genre reading (and writing) is on the increase in Australia, have Creative Writing programs been responsible for an increase in these sales?

For example is the current buzz surrounding Stephanie Meyers ‘Twilight series; a ‘bad’ thing that it is selling well in our stores? Can we seriously answer “yes” if it is American and “no” if it is produced elsewhere in the world? Is this not reverse cultural cringe?

Does it take away sales from Australian texts in the same genre, or does it draw readers to experiment with similar jacketed books?

Is it not possible that these O/S titles build readership for our own writing? I contend that the popularity of Writer’s Festivals and the careful programming that situates our writers alongside overseas writers creates a space for proximal reading or parataxis of both texts?

And does it matter if our ‘common’ readers are reading genre and literary fiction from other Nations?

‘A mix of fiction and not-so-traditional Australian Vampire mythology, this tale follows their dangerous trail throughout Melbourne, showing us that we might know nothing about vampires after all!!’ – Hellen Maniatis (HEART Book group).

http://www.bookstore.bookpod.com.au

The final version of this paper will be available as a chapter in the forthcoming publication Banking on Creativity: Thoughts on Creativity, Innovation and the Economic Discourse in the Creative Industries. (Current working title)

Edited by Dominique Hecq and Carol-Anne CrokerDue for publication early 2010.

ccroker@groupwise.swin.edu.au