Performances in Contradiction: Facilitating a Neosophistic Creative Writing Workshop

Abstract

This article examines the ways that creative writing instructors may willingly (or unintentionally) suppress contradiction and indeterminacy in workshop feedback conversations. By suggesting that contradiction and indeterminacy may be fruitful and dynamic sites to investigate craft practice, aesthetics, and authorship, the essay argues for a reassessment of the way teachers facilitate workshop. In addition to drawing on experience in the classroom, the author suggests that workshop become a site where rhetorical and artistic invention are intermeshed in the sophistic pedagogical tradition of antilogikê and dissoi logoi (rhetorical strategies emphasising contradiction and doubt, rather than certainty). The concept of antilogikê is connected to workshop pedagogy through an analysis of William Covino's Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. In the book, Covino suggests that generative magic (rather than arresting magic) provides a lens to analyse language and institutional structures. Using the sophistic concept of antilogikê from Andrea Greenbaum's Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibilities and Covino's analysis of magic, the essay argues that teachers can better encourage the development of apprentice writers by facilitating conversations in the sophistic, rather than the Socratic tradition.