Conversations with Althusser, Bakhtin and Genette: The influence of theory on creative practice

Abstract

This paper offers a personal reflection on how the study of creative writing within an institutional context can influence personal creative practice. It examines how engagement with a range of theoretical approaches can help evolve both writing and thinking. Beginning with an overview of the debate within the creative writing discipline on the benefits that an awareness of critical theory provides to the practitioner, this paper provides a reflection on how exposure to Marxist, semiotic, post-structuralist, and gender theory can stimulate thorough consideration of the separation between ideas and words. Using Louis Althusser’s discussion of class and personal agency in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s semiotic examination of form and ideology in Discourse in the Novel as examples, this paper speculates on the practitioner’s agency in the creative process. Judith Butler’s work on the performative nature of gender construction, Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, and Hélène Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, are cited in relation to how an engagement with the critical can encourage and influence the writing process. Gérard Genette’s writing on narratology is also considered in order to speculate on the utility that an understanding of narratology provides to the practitioner. This paper concludes with a reflection on the benefits that maintaining a sense of fun provides in the pursuit of a meaningful dialogue between the critical and the poetic. It suggests that an interaction with theory can assist practitioners when reflecting on the intricacies and influences implicit in the creative process. It argues that considered engagement with theory leads to better writing.