Stylistics in the creative writing curriculum: A problem-posing approach

Abstract

The synergies between creative writing instruction and stylistic analysis have been noted for more than a decade in the Stylistics literature – see for example Michael Burke (2010: 7; 2013), Jeremy Scott (2013a; 2013b: 99), et al – but there remain very few case studies of the implementation of such an approach. The undergraduate unit KWB211: Stylistics, taught at the Queensland University of Technology, takes a Stylistics approach to the teaching of creative writing to an undergraduate cohort, and furthermore uses the Freirean notion of problem posing as a methodological and philosophical basis for its pedagogic approach. This paper presents a case study of the content and approaches of KWB211: Stylistics. It argues that the natural synergies between the field of Stylistics and the field of Creative Writing can inform the teaching of literary technique to a cohort of undergraduate writers, and that Stylistics can be made to be a practitioner-facing example of literary theory especially when using a problem posing approach to instruction.