Discourse and Creativity

Rodney Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138146006
• eBook ISBN: 9781317861225
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discourse and Creativity examines the way different approaches to discourse analysis conceptualize the notion of creativity and address it analytically. It includes examples of studies of creativity from a variety of traditions and examines the following key areas, how people interpret and use discourse, the processes and practices of discourse production, discourse in modes other than written and spoken language, and the relationship between discourse and the technologies used to produce it.

Discourse and Creativity combines a forward-thinking and interdisciplinary approach to the topic of creativity; this collection will be of great value to students and scholars in applied linguistics, stylistics, and communication studies.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Discourse and Creativity

Rodney H. Jones

This collection presents a range of different perspectives on the relationship between discourse and creativity. It is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different type of discourse: The first section explores literary discourse, the second focuses on creativity in corporate and professional discourse, the third on creativity in multimodal discourse of various kinds, including advertising graphics, fine arts and music, with the final section addressing the impact of new technologies on creative texts and practices. In bringing together studies of creativity in such a wide variety of genres, media and modes from poetry to amateur skateboarding videos, and from such a variety of perspectives in discourse studies, from more traditional literary stylistics to newer approaches such as multimodal and mediated discourse analysis, this volume aims to explore the different kinds of contributions discourse analysis can make to our understanding of creative products, the social and psychological processes that go into making them, and the ways they help to shape the identities, relationships and institutions that make up our societies.

What is Creativity?

In the last two decades, the notion of ‘creativity’ has found its way into nearly every facet of human life, from education to management. A hundred years ago, creativity was seen primarily as the province of artists (poets, painters, composers) and of God. Nowadays, everyone is expected to be creative. A cursory search of the British National Corpus of written and spoken English finds ‘creative’ collocating with such diverse words as accounting, bankruptcy, competition, governance, management, manufacturing, privatisation, recreation and relationships. The last fifty years has seen a proliferation of popular books, courses, and position papers from governments and other institutions on how to make people, businesses, organisations and societies more creative.

This ‘democratisation of creativity’ (Maybin and Swann, 2007) is also reflected in academic research in a range of disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics, which has turned its attention to the everyday creative practices of ordinary people. In such studies, creativity is, in the words of Ron Carter (2004: 13), seen as ‘not a capacity of special people but a special capacity of all people.’

Of course, not all creativity is ‘created equal’. There is a qualitative difference between writing a symphony and creatively altering a recipe when one has run out of sugar. To capture this difference, Boden (2004) famously distinguished between historical creativity and psychological creativity, or, as others have called them, ‘big C Creativity’ and ‘small c creativity’. ‘Big C Creativity’ refers to the creativity of world-changing works of art or scientific discoveries that alter the way people think about a certain problem or domain, whereas ‘small c creativity’ refers to the creativity evident in everyday problem-solving, joking and verbal play: avoiding a traffic jam or coming up with a good pick-up line at a bar. Whereas ‘big C Creativity’ is seen as a sign of genius, ‘small c creativity’ is seen as a sign of mental health, a necessary competence for getting along in the world.

The problem with these definitions is that there is a lot in between the works of Shakespeare and a well-delivered apology to one’s in-laws. Many (indeed most) efforts in art and literature that aspire to the greatness of ‘big C creativity’ sadly miss the mark, and many everyday acts of creativity end up, sometimes unintentionally, having a major impact on the way people think and interact with one another, even if it is often in a rather limited social circle. Most of what is presented as creativity in the following chapters occupies this middle ground. There is poetry (not all of it ‘great’) and music and painting, but there is also advertising, corporate and public relations writing, and the creative practices of young people using digital technologies.

This problem around what counts as ‘creative’ and what does not exposes an even more fundamental confusion in the way we talk about creativity. When we use the word ‘creativity’, are we talking about a property of a particular creative product – a text or an object of art or the expression of a scientific theory – or are we describing a kind of process, what an individual or group of people do to come up with a creative product or inventive solution to a problem? This is to say, does creativity reside in texts (and other social artifacts) or does it reside in people?

Most studies in the humanities, in literary and art criticism, have taken an almost exclusively product based approach to creativity. While some have sought to contextualise creative works in their social or historical contexts or to glean from them evidence of the workings of the artist’s mind, the starting point has nearly always been the text.

In the social sciences, on the other hand, particularly in psychology, scholars have been more interested in the creative process. Psychological studies of scientific creativity (see for example Simonton, 1988; Gruber and Davis, 1988) and artistic creativity (see for example Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1976) have focused on mental processes and cognitive models. Some like Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer (1995) and Runco (1990) have offered theories of the ‘stages’ of the creative process as it occurs in an individual’s consciousness. Others have taken a more socio-cultural or interpersonal approach to creative processes, seeing them as not just taking place in the minds of the individuals but also in the interaction between individuals and their social and cultural environments. Here we could include Harrington’s (1990) ecological approach, the interactionist model of Woodman and Schoenfeldt (1990), and the systems approach of Csikszentmihalyi (1990).

Thus far, however, there has not been a clearly articulated perspective which integrates approaches which focus on the creative properties of products (by which we mean primarily ‘texts’, whether they be verbal, visual or expressed in some other semiotic mode) and the processes through which they come into being. Not only have product based approaches not adequately addressed issues of production and consumption, but process based approaches – which have typically proceeded by examining the practices of ‘creative individuals’ such as renowned artists and scientists – have been less effective in clearly identifying the concrete features in these individuals’ achievements which make them creative. Even within the process approach, there remains a gap between those who take a more cognitive or intra-psychic perspective and those who take a more socio-cultural or interpersonal perspective (John-Steiner, 1992).

It is the premise of this volume that discourse analysis, particularly as it has developed in the past thirty years through contact with other disciplines like cultural studies, cognitive psychology, sociology and anthropology, can make a significant contribution to bridging these gaps. Nearly all of the chapters in this book deal explicitly with the creative processes that go into the production and interpretation of discourse, sometimes focusing more on cognitive processes, as in the chapters by Stockwell and Forceville, and sometimes more on social processes, as in the chapters by Swann and Jones. At the same time, all of them enter this exploration of process through the analysis of creative products – discourse – and it is in the concrete features of discourse that evidence for these social and cognitive processes is found. Moreover, while some of the scholars included here emphasise the psychological aspects of these processes and some the social aspects, discourse itself serves as a link between the two, the site at which is played out the eternal tension between what the individual wishes to think or do or express and what his or her society or culture deems appropriate or meaningful or ‘creative’.

‘Language and Creativity’ vs ‘Discourse and Creativity’

There has been considerable interest over the years in various sub-fields of linguistics in the notion of creativity. It might, in fact, be argued that creativity is at the very core of language itself, the ‘essential property’ of which is, according to Chomsky (1965: 6), ‘that it provides the means for expressing indefinitely many thoughts and for reacting appropriately in an indefinite range of new situations.’

In the areas of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, interest in creativity has led scholars in two distinct directions, some focusing on the application of linguistic principles to the analysis of texts that are a priori deemed ‘creative’ such as literary works and advertising slogans, and others focusing more on the creative and playful features of everyday language.

Scholars who take literature as their objects a study of literature include literary stylisticians such as Fowler (1996), Leech and Short (1981), Widdowson (1975) and Toolan (1998) who apply the tools of linguistics to the analysis of literary language. While some working in this tradition have endeavoured to focus on aspects of language use normally associated with ‘discourse’ such as pragmatics (Black, 2006), speech acts (Pratt, 1977), interpersonal politeness (Magnusson, 1999), conversational structures (Norrick, 2000), and schema (Cook, 1994), most work in this area is primarily product based, defining creativity as a function of ‘patterns of formal features’ and ‘linguistic idiosyncrasies of particular texts’ (Cook, 1998: 205) rather than as a function of the processes that go into making those texts or how those texts are used to take actions in broader socio-cultural contexts.

Approaches which focus less on traditional ‘creative texts’ and more on the creativity of everyday language are perhaps best represented by the work of Ron Carter who, in his 2004 book Language and creativity: The art of everyday talk and elsewhere (Carter, 1999; Carter and McCarthy, 2004) argues that features associated with literary texts like word play, rhyme, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, understatement, irony, repetition and parallelism are actually common features in the everyday spoken English of ordinary people. The hard and fast distinction between literary and non-literary language is, he contends, artificial and unhelpful; literariness is more usefully seen as a ‘cline’ from, to use the terminology discussed above, the ‘small c creativity’ of commonplace talk to the ‘big C Creativity’ of the literary canon. Other researchers working in the same vein include Cook (2000), Crystal (1998) and Maybin and Swann (2006, 2007).

Like literary stylistics, linguistic approaches to everyday creativity have also made use of principles from discourse analysis. Carter, for example, addresses not just the literary features of everyday talk but also the communicative functions of these features in different kinds of social contexts and in different forms of social interaction. On the whole, however, most work in this tradition is also primarily product oriented, concerning itself almost exclusively with ‘poetic language’, in the sense that Jakobson (1960: 356) meant the term as a ‘focus on the message for its own sake’ rather than on the role of the message in broader social processes. Even when they take socio-pragmatic aspects of language use into account, researchers in this paradigm tend to focus on the social functions of creative language (by which they usually mean ‘literary-like’ language) rather than the function of language (of all kinds) in performing creative acts.

How, then, does the ‘discourse and creativity’ approach represented in this book differ from the approaches described above? To answer this question it is necessary first to understand what we mean by discourse. While all of the authors in this book might answer that question slightly differently, most definitions of discourse in the context of applied linguistics and socio-linguistics draw on three broad conceptualisations of language: language beyond the level of the sentence or clause; language in use; and language as part of a broader range of social practices associated with power and the social construction of knowledge. It is important to stress that these three conceptualisations of language are not so much separate and mutually exclusive ‘definitions of discourse’ as they are different aspects of the same phenomenon, none of which can be properly understood without reference to the others. Nearly all contemporary approaches to discourse take all three of these aspects into account, though they might focus more on one or another of them.

The first conceptualisation – language beyond the sentence – can be traced back to the linguist Zellig Harris (1952), who in the early fifties used the term ‘discourse’ to describe the next level in an analytical hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. What Harris proposed was a method of analysing language beyond the sentence by attending to the distribution and combination of various linguistic features throughout longer stretches of text. This approach, however, is not just an extension of the Russian formalists’ search for intra-textual regularities. Even in Harris’s early formulation, patterns of linguistic features beyond the clause need to be further related to patterns of behaviour beyond the text itself. In his seminal 1952 paper he proposes ‘discourse analysis’ as a means of addressing two interrelated problems, the first arising from the fact that most models of descriptive linguistics stop at the level of the sentence, and the second arising from the need to correlate ‘culture’ and language, that is, to understand the connection between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour.

The implication of a view of discourse as ‘language beyond the sentence’ for a ‘discourse and creativity’ approach is that in such an approach creativity is never seen as a matter of isolated instances of ‘poetic’ language, but rather as a matter of how all the features of a text, poetic or not, work together to form an effective whole, and further, how this whole interacts with the social context in which it is situated. In other words, puns, metaphors, or instances of rhyme or parallelism are not considered creative in themselves but rather are seen as creative insofar as they fit into larger patterns of structure and meaning.

This search for patterns in texts is, of course, not unique to discourse analysis. It is also central to literary stylistics in the more traditional sense. This practice of pattern seeking, of relating smaller parts to larger wholes, however, is the necessary starting point for a ‘discourse and creativity’ approach and for all of the chapters in this volume. It is fitting, then, that the book begins with Michael Toolan’s treatment of repetition in poetry, a treatment that illustrates the attention to patterning so central to the conceptualisation of discourse we are developing in this book while at the same time paying tribute to traditional stylistics.

Implicit in this analytical stance towards creativity is also the notion that underpinning the creative process itself is the ability to recognise and exploit patterns in our experience of the world and in the semiotic systems within which we work. Bohm (1998), for example, in his treatment of scientific creativity, defines the creative process as one of perceiving new orders of relationships in old structures and of linking previously unrelated ideas, concepts or elements into new patterns. From this perspective, the relationship of patterning to creativity is double-edged. On the one hand creativity involves understanding and being able to exploit old patterns, structures and rules, and on the other hand it involves breaking out of old patterns and coming up with new ones. As Thurlow reminds us in his chapter, ‘creative practice always emerges out of the dialectical tension between fixity and mobility, constraint and freedo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Publisher's Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Discourse and Creativity
• Part One Literary creativity
• Part Two Creativity in professional communication
• Part Three Multimodal creativity
• Part Four Discourse, creativity and technology
• Index