Creative Writing and the New Humanities

Paul Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134320844
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the institutional history and disciplinary future of creative writing in the contemporary academy, looking well beyond the perennial questions 'can writing be taught?' and 'should writing be taught?'. Paul Dawson traces the emergence of creative writing alongside the new criticism in American universities; examines the writing workshop in relation to theories of creativity and literary criticism; and analyzes the evolution of creative writing pedagogy alongside and in response to the rise of 'theory' in America, England and Australia. Dawson argues that the discipline of creative writing developed as a series of pedagogic responses to the long-standing 'crisis' in literary studies. His polemical account provides a fresh perspective on the importance of creative writing to the emergence of the 'new humanities' and makes a major contribution to current debates about the role of the writer as public intellectual.

1 From imagination to creativity

The phrase ‘creative writing’ has several meanings. It operates as a synonym for literature; for published works of fiction, poetry and drama. It is also the name given to a subject or course of study in which students produce writing which is generally considered ‘creative’; that is, writing in the aforementioned literary genres. Hence a division can be made between creative writing as literature and creative writing as ‘pseudo-literature’ – as Robert Scholes calls it in Textual Power (1985: 5) – since the creative writing produced by students is recognised by academic credit rather than publication and general circulation, although it aspires to the status of literature.

Creative writing does not have to refer specifically to ‘literary’ works, however, but to any writing which is ‘creative’, i.e. original, unconventional, expressive, etc. It is sometimes seen in opposition to literature. Kevin Brophy, for example, questions attempts to duplicate mainstream literary forms in the writing workshop. He sees creative writing as a practice, as ‘a pursuit of creativity’, which can free writers from the traditional and established genres of the ‘recent modernist literary canon’ – novels, plays and poems – and thus from concepts of authorship as an elitist and solitary practice (1998: 34). In schools creative writing is often described as the free expression of a child's personality, the verbal enunciation of their individual creativity. In Creative Writing in the Primary School, the school teacher A. Chapple defines ‘creative writing’ as ‘that written expression in which children put down their own ideas, thoughts, feelings and impressions in their own words. It is writing that is original as opposed to imitative. It is sincere, personal expression that is flavoured by the personality of the child’ (1977: 1).

It is my intention to approach Creative Writing as a discipline, that is, as a body of knowledge and a set of pedagogical practices which operate through the writing workshop and are inscribed within the institutional site of a university. In order to understand how the discipline of Creative Writing developed, however, it is first necessary to understand how the phrase ‘creative writing’ developed and came to incorporate all the meanings listed above. My aim in this chapter is to provide an account of the historical development of the word ‘creative’, the phrase ‘creative writing’, and the word ‘creativity’ as it is these words and their associations which organise our understanding of writing programmes. My argument is that the discipline of Creative Writing is a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, made possible by the transition in the common parlance of literary criticism from the faculty of imagination to that of creativity, and by the importance of this concept of creativity to the rise of modern English Studies.

It is beyond the scope of this study to provide a history of the complex notion of the imagination. I would like to briefly sketch, however, the historical trajectory of the word as it shifted from a largely passive mental faculty to become the central focus of Romantic theory by virtue of its reconceptualisation as a creative faculty. My concern here is with how the developing notion of man's ‘creative power’ caused interest in the imagination to shift by the end of the nineteenth century to ‘creativity’, precisely because its associations had outgrown the word, and how this shift enabled a democratisation of concepts of authorship in particular and human productivity in general. This was not merely a semantic transition. Despite the emphasis placed on the imagination by the Romantics, not just as the source of poetry, but as a divine presence in man and the active agent of all human perception, the word still retains ambiguous connotations. Confronted with evidence of an erroneous recollection or an inaccurate memory, one will say, ‘it must have been my imagination’. When challenging a false assertion one claims that ‘you're imagining things’. The imagination can distort the future by the negative projection of possible outcomes, or can play tricks on the senses. ‘A paranoid, overactive imagination was a sure sign of stress’ (1999: 191) writes Tara Moss in the recent Australian crime thriller, Fetish.

Creativity, on the other hand, designates the ability to create; to produce something new and original, to provide innovative changes to anything which is routine or mechanistic. Its products are the unique expression of each individual, without any association with the senses and their capacity to fool the mind. The source of creativity comes wholly from within man without associating, compounding or unifying imported sensory data and without the internalisation of the divine spirit. Creativity is the productive imagination fully secularised and divested of any ambivalent connotations. ‘No word in English’, Raymond Williams points out in The Long Revolution, ‘carries a more consistently positive reference than “creative”’ (1965: 19). The word ‘creative’ entered our language at the end of the seventeenth century. In order to understand how and why, we must be aware of how the imagination was perceived at this time, for it is the imagination which the idea of creative power modifies and ultimately supplants.

The reproductive imagination

The most common understanding of the imagination in the seventeenth century was as the mental ability to reproduce images previously apprehended by the senses. It was also the part of the mind capable of producing wild, irrational ideas or images with no corresponding object in reality, and of inducing delusion by tricking the senses. These two strands of thought are illustrated by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon. Their work challenged the classical theory of poetry as a madness and heat fuelled by divine inspiration, and appears to have had profound influence on the literary criticism of the time.

Hobbes, in Leviathan, describes the faculty of imagination as ‘memory’ ([1651] 1968: 89) or ‘decaying sense’ (88). This ‘decaying sense’ is a neutral description rather than a negative one; it refers to what happens to the imprint of a sensory impression upon the mind after the object apprehended is no longer in sight and others take its place. Here we can see that Hobbes is representing the imagination as a reproductive faculty; it does not generate anything new from within the mind, but retains what was perceived of the external world. Hobbes goes on to explain that there are two levels to this faculty. The recall, or straightforward mental reproduction, of a previously apprehended object is ‘simple Imagination; as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is Compounded; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure’ (89). It is this compound imagination which the poet works with.

John Dryden, England's first official poet laureate and the preeminent literary critic of the time, provides an account of the use of imagination in poetry, similar to Hobbes's simple imagination, in the preface to Annus Mirabilis. Here Dryden describes the composition of poems as a production of wit. This wit consists of the ‘faculty of imagination in the writer . . . which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent’ ([1667] 1900: 14). As he continues, however, the imagination is given more scope than mere recall. It incorporates Hobbes's compound imagination as a faculty which can piece together elements from memory, but it is expanded to encompass a series of compositional stages (invention, fancy, and expression) organised around similar principles to those of classical rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio).

A concurrent idea of the imagination in poetry emphasises the ambivalence felt towards this faculty, because of its capacity to produce images and ideas which do not exist in nature, and hence places the imagination in opposition to reason. Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning, had effected this philosophical division between reason and imagination. ‘The parts of human learning’, he wrote, ‘have reference to the three parts of man's understanding, which is to the seat of learning: History to his memory, Poesy to his imagination, and Philosophy to his reason’ ([1605] n.d.: 89). Poetry is considered ‘feigned History’ and tries to fashion accounts of events which are more satisfying than those which actually happened. For Bacon the imagination is an agent or messenger which operates between the two provinces of sense and reason (121). Poetry ‘doth truly refer to the imagination, which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which Nature hath severed, and sever that which Nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things’ (89).

After Bacon, there appears to be much concern in effecting the right balance between imagination and reason in the production of poetry. Throughout the seventeenth century we see claims, such as those by Thomas Rymer, that the poet's imagination had to be reined in by reason or judgement. ‘Reason must consent and ratify whatever by fancy is attempted in its absence,’ Rymer wrote, ‘or else ’tis all null and void in law’ ([1678] 1908: 185). The reason why poets were encouraged to keep their wild imagination in check was that poems were required to meet certain objective (classical) standards. A ‘Poet is not to leave his reason,’ Rymer asserted, ‘and blindly abandon himself to follow fancy, for then his fancy might be monstrous, might be singular, and please no body's maggot but his own; but reason is to be his guide, reason is common to all people, and can never carry him from what is Natural’ (192). It is important to note that the imagination was still considered essential to the composition of poetry. The concern was with the correct balance between this faculty and that of reason. John Sheffield, in ‘An Essay Upon Poetry’, writes: ‘As all is dullness, when the Fancy's bad, / So without Judgement, Fancy is but mad’ ([1682] 1908: 287).

Poetic creation

The notion of man as a creative being is a product of Renaissance humanism, originating in Italy. ‘We speak now of the artist's activity as “creation”,’ Raymond Williams comments in The Long Revolution, ‘but the word used by Plato and Aristotle is the very different “imitation”’ (1965: 19–20). Since antiquity poetic production had been referred to as mimesis, or imitation of nature, based on the authority of these two philosophers. The Renaissance introduced the idea of poetry as creation. The creation of a world in the poet's mind, of a heterocosm, was considered analogous to the divine act of creation by God. ‘“There are two creators,” wrote Torquato Tasso (1544–95), “God and the poet”’ (R. Williams, 1988: 82).

This concept of the poet as creator was introduced to Elizabethan England by Sir Philip Sidney in An Apology for Poetry. Sidney follows the authority of Aristotle in claiming that poetry is an art of imitation, and that it is a higher art than history because it is closer to philosophy and its capacity to represent universal truth. He claims, however, that poetry exceeds even philosophy in terms of efficacy, and is in fact the ‘Monarch’ of all human sciences because it presents knowledge and ideas in a palatable and pleasing form. He parts company even further with Aristotle when he abandons any pretensions to mere imitation of nature: ‘the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as were never in Nature’ ([1595] 1922: 7).

Sidney was aware of the potential blasphemy of this ‘saucy’ comment (8), for it seems to put the poet on the same level as God by comparing poetry to the divine act of Creation. He defends this comparision, however, by claiming that inspiration is a gift from God and the artistic product is a celebration of his glory. So instead of being inspired, being breathed into by divine power and becoming possessed with a mad poetic frenzy, the poet composes with a power like that of God. This power, rather than the ability to imitate nature, is a power to create another nature, one far more pleasing or so unlike the natural world as to justify the comparison of the poet with god. What the poet imitates is not natural phenomena but that which produced them – God's creative power.

It is notable that Sidney does not employ the word ‘create’, and this is because of the aforementioned potential for blasphemy. For instance, in a poem of 1592, entitled ‘Of the Soul of Man and the Immortalitie Thereof’, John Davies writes that ‘to create, to God alone pertaines’ (Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database). Instead Sidney talks of the vigour of the poet's invention. As Logan Pearsall Smith explains, the ‘term invention, which criticism had inherited from classical rhetoric, served for a long time as a name for that finding in Nature of something new to copy which was called originality’ (1925: 89). As the connection between invention and originality became stretched, Smith argues, ‘create’ became an ‘alternative word’ for ‘invent’ (91). It may also be noted that rather than a compositional act which required the discovery of a topic to be worked up for presentation, invention became an innate quality, the mental faculty responsible for originality.

The introduction of the analogy between the poet and God enabled the use of the words ‘create’ and ‘creation’ in reference to poetry. What did it mean to be creative? Originally this was the capacity to produce figures or characters in poetry for which there was no correlation in nature. In the preface to Troilus and Cressida, Dryden wrote that, with the character of Caliban, Shakespeare ‘seems there to have created a person which was not in Nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch’ ([1679] 1900: 219). Dryden defends this possible impropriety by use of the Hobbesian compound imagination. In the same way that a centaur is fashioned out of the image of a man and a horse, so Caliban is conceived out of ‘an incubus and a sorceress’, beings in which ‘at least the vulgar still believe’ (219). The ability to produce things which did not exist in nature gradually came to be seen not as delusion, or the workings of wild fancy which needed governing by reason, or as Hobbesian compounded imagination, but as original creation, analogous with that of God. And this creation gained respectability because rather than the fanciful inventions of mediaeval and Elizabethan romances, it applied to the work of Shakespeare, the greatest of English writers. This view was popularised by Joseph Addison in his series of essays ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ which appeared in The Spectator in 1712.

Creative power

When the adjective ‘creative’ entered the language the poet's faculty of invention ceased to be metaphorically associated with Creation and became etymologically linked. That the word ‘creative’ signifies an internalisation of divinity is obvious when the context of its first appearances is examined. The Oxford English Dictionary and Raymond Williams (1988) cite Ralph Cudworth as the first to use the word. The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) was written to refute the arguments of atheism, and within it Cudworth talks of the ‘Divine, miraculous, creative power’ of God (qtd in R. Williams 1988: 83).

The first use of the word in reference to man's poetic ability appears to be in 1700 in the poem, ‘To Amasia speaking an Extempore Verse’, by John Hopkins. In this poem Hopkins praises his muse, Amasia, by comparing her to God: ‘You, like creative Heav'n your Labours Frame; / You spoke the Word, and at your Breath they came’. This simile becomes a concrete description in another poem in the same collection, ‘Love in Idea’, where he talks of ‘Creative fancy ever springing more’ (Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database). Three years later Sarah Egerton eulogised Dryden's ‘creative strains’ in ‘An Ode on the Death of Mr. Dryden’ ([1703] 1987: 75).

According to Raymond Williams (1988) and Logan Pearsall Smith (1925) the minor English poet David Mallet was the first to use the word ‘creative’ in relation to the powers of the poet. In 1728 Mallet opened his long poem, The Excursion, with: ‘Companion of the Muse, Creative Power, Imagination!’ (qtd in R. Williams, 1988: 83). While the work of Hopkins and Egerton seems to suggest earlier uses of the word, this would appear to be its first association with the imagination. We must remember Hopkins's ‘creative fancy’, however, for fancy at this stage was interchangeable with imagination. Addison, for example, used the two terms ‘promiscuously’ in The Spectator in 1712 (1982a: 368).

The word ‘creative’ became established in general usage by the mid-eighteenth century. And it is the concept of man's creative power which motivated speculations about original genius, as opposed to imitative talent, that began to appear at this time. The doctrine of original genius provided a conclusive answer to the debate between the merits of the Ancients and the Moderns which had occupied so much criticism in previous centuries. Modern poets had to be less slavish in their following of the ancients if they were to attain the same heights; they had to emulate the genius of the ancients rather than imitate their writing. As a result the grounds for critical evaluation shifted from the classical learning of poets (evidenced in their adherence to ‘rules’ such as the ancient unities) to their capacity for originality.

Joseph Addison prepares the ground for this shift in number 160 of The Spectator (1711), and in Tom Jones Henry Fielding outlines with disdain its growing influence ([1749] 1992: 523). A number of treatises on the concept of original genius emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the most influential of which was Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. ‘Imitations are of two kinds,’ Young claimed, ‘one of nature, one of authors. The first we call originals, and confine the term imitation to the second’ ([1759] 1947: 273). What Young means by imitating nature is different from what Aristotle means, however, for he is referring to a personal experience of nature achieved by introspection, rather than an objective representation of universal forms.

Young plays down the importance of learning and upholds the native force of mind of genius. ‘Genius is a masterworkman, learning is but an instrument’ (279). Genius ‘can set us right in composition, without the rules of the learned’ (280). To prove that genius, the only mind from which originality can come, is not rare, Young claims that there may be many geniuses unknown to us. ‘There might have been more able consuls called from the plough than ever arrived at that honour: many a genius probably there has been which could neither write nor read’ (282).

Original genius is the culmination of a gradual conflation of the classical theories of the source of poetry: divine inspiration and natural talent. Genius, which originally meant an attendant spirit, became, according to Young, ‘that God within’; an innate quality rather than an external inspiration. But because it is original or creative, it has the same characteristics of inspiration: an ease of composition, often spontaneous and frenzied, accompanied by an inability to explain its function. Where Young's work differs from ideas of the previous century is in his psychologising of genius, and his attempt to encourage it. ‘Born originals,’ he asks, ‘how comes it to pass that we die copi...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Creative Writing and the New Humanities
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: building a garret in the ivory tower
• 1 From imagination to creativity
• 2 Disciplinary origins
• 3 Workshop poetics
• 4 Creative Writing in Australia
• 5 Negotiating Theory
• 6 What is a literary intellectual?
• Conclusion: towards a sociological poetics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index