Public thinking, public feeling: research tools for Creative Writing

Abstract

The numbers, over the last three decades, show a massive increase in creative writing courses, numbers of staff, and output of theses and published works. Other creative arts are progressing in parallel. Confining my discussion to the case of the writer, I want to signal changes in the kinds of institutional affiliations and pathways that make writing public, where the links lie between industry, educational institutions, festivals and writers’ guilds. More significant for the university sector are the kinds of shifts that have occurred in the establishment of a discipline of creative writing that seek to validate its theoretical framework for the purposes of teaching and research. In teaching, it has becoming clear that the technical vocabulary used for the critique and appreciation of literary works does not effectively speak to creative practice pedagogy. In research, as evidenced in the ERA process, the solid theoretical, methodological and national benefit vocabulary has yet to be seen that would make writing a novel a viable central part of an ARC Discovery application. To flesh this out, I sketch the framework for the kinds of social ‘contexts’ that create the different publics addressed and created by literary texts. This is a different version of the social from traditional sociological ones; mine is organised around flows and coagulations of thoughts and feelings, following in some respects the recent work of Bruno Latour. I attempt to apply his framework, and that of Kathleen Stewart, to creative writing with a reading of Helen Garner, and show how literature draws on, and reproduces, structures of thought and feeling in specific ways. This necessitates the argument that fictional texts, in using language in a different fashion from works of reference, sustain their existence by being suspended in an ecology of heterogeneous allies.