Beyond Craft

An Anti-Handbook for Creative Writers

Steve Westbrook, James Ryan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350119475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

Simultaneously a handbook and a critique of one, Beyond Craft combines an orientation to the field of creative writing with an insight into current scholarship surrounding creative writing pedagogy. A much-needed alternative to the traditional craft guide, this text pairs advice and exercises on composition with an illuminating commentary on the issues surrounding these very techniques. Teaching the craft whilst apprising students of the issues of craft pedagogy, this book allows them to gain an awareness of how current pedagogy comes at the expense of larger and increasingly relevant cultural concerns. Westbrook and Ryan bring emerging writers into the larger conversations that define the field, inviting them to: - Contextualize their own writing practices and educational experiences in relation to the history of creative writing as an academic discipline. - Determine how New Critical lore and Romantic mythology may affect-even distort-their understanding of literary
production. - Critically examine their notions of authorship, collaboration, and invention in relation to contemporary literary and
rhetorical theory. - Understand and evaluate the economic, social, political, and professional challenges facing creative writers today. - Analyze the contemporary literary marketplace not only to identify potential publication contexts but also to understand how issues of diversity and bias affect writing communities. - Reflect on how increasingly rapid technological developments may affect their own writing and the future of literature. Earnestly self-aware throughout, Beyond Craft both inducts new writers into the field of creative writing and infuses them with an understanding of the wider dialogue surrounding their craft.

1

From Art for Art’s Sake to Craft for Craft’s Sake:

Our Love-Hate Relationship with the Academic History of Creative Writing

You may have heard the phrase “art for art’s sake” before, perhaps in a literature, art, or philosophy class. Maybe you associate the phrase with the work of Oscar Wilde, who famously quipped that “all art is quite useless” in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (4). Maybe you’ve come across the idea in the philosophy of Kant, who is often credited for formally developing theories of artistic autonomy. And, whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably seen it at the movies many times: the Latin version of the phrase—Ars Gratia Artis—flanks the head of another famous cat: Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Leo, the roaring lion.

Clearly there are numerous articulations of this phrase (and its underlying suppositions) in academic and popular culture. While aestheticism was popularized in the latter half of the nineteenth century by writers like Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and Victor Cousin, who were reacting against the pervasiveness of didacticism and sentimentalism in the literature of their time, it has since come to represent a theory that suggests art should not necessarily be concerned with its own participation in larger cultural arenas. Art should simply exist. In other words, a theory of pure aesthetics treats what DeMaria calls “the highest kind of importance: the creation of beauty” (2) as an end in itself. Artists and writers who subscribe to this philosophy often claim that they are making art or creating beauty instead of participating in social, political, and economic arenas; they are artists, not ideologues.

And therein lies the beauty of paradox, or rather the paradox of beauty, as it were. To believe that an art like fiction or poetry exists only for the sake of being beautiful is, in fact, to subscribe to a kind of ideological belief. If we claim we are writing a poem, say, to express beauty as an end itself (a perfectly admirable motive), we are affiliating ourselves with a particular way of thinking that is not neutral, that has its own contested biases and historical traditions, and that also has its share of detractors and opponents. Indeed, whether we know it or not, the poem we write may echo the work of a previous advocate of aestheticism, say Archibald Mac Leish. His “Ars Poetica” famously argues that rather than engage in worldly communicative exchanges or cultural practices, a poem should remain as “mute / As a globed fruit” (1–2), a still and silent object of display that is to be properly admired and appreciated solely for the artistry of its construction—much like a still life painting. Or, as MacLeish states succinctly in his final couplet, “A poem should not mean / But be” (23–24). At the same time we may be echoing MacLeish, we may also be evoking a counter-position to his aestheticism, perhaps a figure like Chinua Achebe, who in the later twentieth century insisted that art is inevitably useful—as it fulfills functional purposes for the development of community—and who famously expressed his disdain for aestheticism in language equally poetic and crass: “art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit” (29, his italics). Whether we intend to or not, we are conjuring up these positions and counter-positions (in some cases with alarming appeals to our senses). Through the practice of writing our hypothetical poem, we are entering into a dialogue with others—of different races, genders, classes, nationalities, and historical epochs than our own—who may have expressed similar or different ways of thinking. In no way are we able to isolate our pursuit of beauty, for in this pursuit we are inevitably collaborating with these others or, at the very least, affiliating ourselves with their work in one way or another. Depending on how literally you take Achebe’s words, you might say we are inadvertently stepping in a pile of it.

Whether we name our affiliation a political or “politicized” one, it inevitably affects and is affected by contested cultural arenas. In fact, we like to compare the paradox of aestheticism to the issue of attempted nonparticipation in democratic elections. Choosing not to affiliate art with politics is inevitably to make a political statement the way that choosing not to vote is inevitably to engage in a political act. Regardless of their intentions, citizens who do not cast their ballots affect the outcome of an election. In these cases, the very absence of individuals’ votes may wind up being the determining factor in who is or is not elected. This, of course, is the reason that some candidates and organizations try to encourage low voter turnout through covert means of disenfranchisement when preliminary poll numbers do not appear to be in their party’s favor. More simply put, trying to suggest that art can be isolated is sort of like trying to write the word nonparticipation without including its last five syllables.

Before we get too much further into our line of argument, we’d like to be clear about one thing: we love beauty. Seriously, we like to think that we pursue beauty relentlessly, not only in the paintings we choose to hang on our walls, in our (failed) efforts at feng shui, but also in the things we create: our gardens, our (failed) attempts to bake perfect cardamom-spiced carrot cakes, and, yes, our creative writing. That being said, when we think critically about beauty, especially as applied to writing or art, we don’t quite understand how it can supposedly exist in a cultural vacuum or (to return to our unfortunate initial metaphor) be trapped like a cat inside a box. Here is the catch: Unlike the experiment of Schrödinger’s cat, art for art’s sake presupposes that beauty can be said to exist (or not exist) without the necessary consideration and complication of participant-observers: i.e., beholders looking into the box, people who occupy specific positions in culture and make decisions about what is and is not beautiful in this world based largely on their positions.

All of this is our rather longwinded way of saying that no matter how much proponents of aestheticism may want to walk or, better yet, dance right past the ballot boxes of the present or the salons, town squares, and agoras of the past, their waltzes and foxtrots—however artful and however seemingly isolated—have a larger effect in the world. Ultimately, art for art’s sake (like a state of superposition) is a beautiful impossibility in a world that extends beyond the parameters of closed boxes. We might like to dwell in this mythology—in fact, the phrase beautiful impossibility has a utopian ring to our ears—but despite our best efforts we can’t sustain the kind of isolation it would require. It simply is not possible. Of course, this hasn’t stopped creative writing teachers from trying. As the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat has set a precedent for experimentation in quantum physics, the beautiful impossibility of art for art’s sake has defined the mythology of creative writing from its academic inception. In fact, the strength of aestheticism’s foundational influence on creative writing serves to explain why the philosophy has had such a lingering effect—despite the impossibility of its assertions—on the discipline, its teaching materials, and its obsession with craft.

A Beautiful Impossibility: On Creative Writing’s Formative Influences

Although the origins of creative writing in US academies may be traced as far back as the late nineteenth century, its modern history as an institutionalized fine art is usually located in the founding of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshops and the proliferation of New Criticism in the late 1930s. At Iowa, creative writing (known at the time as “imaginative literature”) was initially instituted as a component of the university’s PhD program in English, which, scholars have pointed out, offered a generous approach to study that also included language, literary history, and criticism (see Foerster, Graff, Mayers, and Myers). Students enrolled in the program attended a range of classes in these four areas and entered into a field of specialization only in their final year of coursework. As D G Myers states in The Elephants Teach, the program was designed for different “types of students—teachers, scholars, critics, and writers” (133, his italics).

However, shortly after creative writing appeared in the PhD curriculum, it was relocated to a new Master of Fine Arts program. Important to note here is the material and symbolic shift from the philosophical arena (a both/and approach to study) to the studio arts model (an either/or approach), which severed creative writing from other branches of inquiry, restricting the curriculum largely to poetry and fiction workshops designed exclusively for emerging poets and fiction writers. It was within the MFA program, a curricular model that had been the province of the visual and performing arts, that creative writing began to be formally practiced and conceptualized more exclusively as an artistic craft. In fact, the term craft seemed to enjoy a sudden omnipresence shortly after this shift. According to Wilbur Schramm, who directed the Iowa Writer’s Workshops from 1939 to 1942, the new MFA program allowed students to approach one another’s poems and stories “with the intelligent understanding of a fellow craftsman in order to see how others have met the common problems of the craft and to estimate the effectiveness of their solution” (165, our italics). This kind of specialization, perhaps useful and innovative, nonetheless signaled a defining separation of more narrowly focused issues of craft from larger theoretical issues of culture: it forced students to opt quite literally, in choosing their degree, for either fine art (MFA) or other forms of philosophical, cultural, and critical study (PhD).

The shift toward aestheticism that coincided with creative writing’s attempt to establish its own separate identity was made possible by the work of the New Critics, a group of writers including Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and others, who essentially made aestheticism into a way of understanding literature. Within the context of the 1930s, the New Critics reconceptualized literary studies (and in doing so helped to establish the discipline of creative writing) in part by pursuing two goals. First, they sought to effectively isolate “imaginative literature” from what they called the “contamination” of sentimentality, didacticism, and political discourse, or what they often referred to collectively as “propaganda.” In this sense, they might be said to have extended the work of late nineteenth century aesthetes, although they were, of course, reacting to the literature and philosophy of their time. As Gerald Graff has pointed out, the 1930s “generated theories of art so crudely propagandistic that they made the separation of art from politics seem an attractive or even a necessary position” (146). For example, some Marxists of the time argued that all art should serve a political purpose, one that would, in the words of Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, “pull the republic out of the mud” (150).

Second, the New Critics sought to eliminate the excessive pedantry, or what they often referred to as “scientism,” that in their view was corrupting the academic study of literature. By the way, if they could somehow time-travel into the present, they would surely detest our foray into physics; they’d likely try to stuff Schrödinger’s cat back into his box, duct tape the lid shut, slap a stamp on the top, and mail him back to the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

At the time, however, their reaction against scientism may have made a little more sense. When it came to literature, English departments tended to offer what Jed Rasula calls “a philologically disposed” form of “historical scholarship” (74), a method of analysis that treated literary texts more as artifacts of linguistic, etymological, and historical interest than carefully crafted artistic texts worthy of study in their own right. In other words, scholars seemed to approach literary texts more as archaeological evidence—i.e., dead things used by scientists to understand dead cultures—than the soulful stuff of current human experience: artistic texts written by actual living, breathing people. Alan Tate’s famous complaint reflected their position: “We study literature today from various historical points of view as if nobody intended to write any more of it” (qtd. In Schramm 179). By shifting the focus of analysis away from external factors and onto the ways in which authors used internal structural devices to produce what they deemed variously the “total effect” or “organic unity” of a piece of literature, New Critics like Tate helped to establish a field that would allow students to write more literature. However, in doing so, they also established trends that, in conjunction with the program at Iowa, would lead to the further isolation of craft.

Although the New Critics’ approach may not have been as insular during its own era as it appears from a distance of history, it nonetheless had the effect of severing texts from their social and communicative contexts. This effect was achieved largely through an exclusive focus on the internal conventions or unity of “the text itself,” a phrase that would become a New Critical mantra. Brooks and Warren articulated this approach in Understanding Poetry (1938), an influential anthology/textbook that functioned largely as a default creative writing handbook in an era when few handbooks existed (at least as we know them today). Explaining their approach, they write, “criticism and analysis as modestly practiced in this book and more grandly elsewhere by other hands, is ultimately of value only insofar as it can return readers to the poem itself” (16, their italics). To this end, they focus on devices of craft, or what they deemed “crucial elements”: “metaphor, rhythm, and statement,” for example, “absorbed into a vital unity” (11). After offering this orientation, they go on to downplay the communicative functions of poetry, opting instead to conceptualize the genre as if its quest for beauty or formal perfection begins and ends on the page: “The poem in its vital unity is a ‘formed’ thing, a thing existing in itself, and its vital unity, its form, embodies—is—its meaning” (11). In this fashion, they draw a symbolic border or box around the text, sustaining the illusion that in its aesthetic form, a poem can and should remain untarnished by social, political, cultural, or argumentative discourse, simple didactic interpretation, and the complications of worldly communicative exchange. In doing so, they echo Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” suggesting that internal artistic form trumps all.

Brooks rearticulates this ideology in his own scholarly writings. In Modern Poetry and the Tradition, he argues that “privacy and obscurity … are inevitable in all poetry” (60). He also faults poets who attempt to clearly address public concerns—to reach outside the closed box of the text itself—for corrupting their poetry. When discussing the work of W H Auden, for example, he states the following: “In general, Auden’s poetry weakens as he tries to rely upon an external framework—a doctrine or ideology” (126). This might seem relatively tame, but Brooks even goes so far as to label poets like Langston Hughes and Genevieve Taggard, who attempted to use their work to intervene in social affairs, as “propagandists” (51). In fact, he “convicts” them for being “preoccupied with the inculcation of a particular message” (49 our italics)—much the way DeMaria would, decades later, fault “special interest readers” for being “preoccupied” with representations of race, ethnicity, and gender. While we don’t want to exaggerate the influence of New Critical thinking, we find ourselves awed by the extent of its reach across decades: the echoes here are strikingly evident (even down to the level of diction).

In fact, we find the New Critics’ “convicting” of “propagandists” a foundational example of the kind of discrimination that Junot Diaz and other writers of color would...