Teaching Literature: Creative Writing as Critical Response

Abstract

TEACHING LITERATURE: CREATIVE WRITING AS CRITICAL RESPONSE D E B O R A H B O W E N University of Ottawa T h e title of this paper is intentionally problematic. In the phrase “teach­ ing literature,” for instance, I am intending a kind of semiotic shorthand for a particular and traditional area of English studies, most traditionally understood in the university as existing in an entirely separate universe from the phrase in the second half of the title, “creative writing.” It is this polar­ ization that I want to address, by suggesting that the term “creative writing” can describe a kind of student writing that arises as a primary, generically engaged interaction with “literature.” In distinguishing this kind of response from the traditionally sanctioned academic response of essay, paper, or crit­ ical commentary, I am not of course implying that critical writing does not require creativity. What I want to focus on is perhaps best understood as a matter of convention: “creative writing” as student involvement in the gen­ res traditionally covered by the umbrella of “literature.” In Robert Scholes’s terms, I am looking at the possibilities for “text within text” instead of “text upon text.” 1 What happens when the student positions him- or herself at the desk that the author has vacated, rather than off the stage altogether and maybe even as far removed as the upper balcony? My concern, then, is not with issues of canonicity and literature-as-opposedto -text, but with the question of student passivity versus student productiv­ ity in relation to any text. As Gerald Graff has recently pointed out, “It’s easy to get so caught up in the battle between canonical and noncanonical books that one forgets that for many students it is the life of books as such that is strange and forbidding” (5). The fact that I will consider pri­ marily canonical literature is pragmatically determined, since it has been in teaching such literature that I have experimented in bridging a great gulf fix’d. It was the English Coalition Conference’s 1987 proposal for a new English major that included as its final point the directive that “[a]ll English majors should practice writing in several modes and for different audiences and purposes, with an awareness of the social implications and theoretical issues these shifts raise” (Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford 35). Paul Armstrong, Head of English at the University of Oregon, who was one of the MLA‘s delegates at the conference, comments in the Fall 1990 issue of the ADE Bulletin that E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19 , 3 , S e p t e m b e r 19 9 3 “[t]his proposal advocates ‘a new balance’ in the relation between reading and writing. . . . Instead of privileging reading over writing, as the coverage model implicitly does, English courses of all kinds should make prominent use of writing as a means of inquiry.” Armstrong points out that implicit in all the Coalition’s proposals is “an active, interactive theory of learning” (32). Robert Denham, former Director of ADE, who was also a conference participant, puts it more boldly when he writes that the coalition urged that “practices or activities are a better foundational principle for what teachers do than content is” (28). This principle has of course long been foundational for most elementary and many high-school teachers, but in university-level literature courses its implementation would still, I think, be perceived by a good many professors as little less than radical. The suggestion that the study of literature can be focussed epistemolog­ ically, as a study in and of specific ways of knowing, rather than substan­ tially, as a study of specific texts, can have usefully practical consequences in the present context of the instability of canons. Armstrong starts from the premise that the notion of coherence in English studies is problematic, since the “coverage model” has broken down and an understanding of what constitutes “close reading” has lost a critical consensus. “Once there is no longer agreement about what it means to read,” he argues, “then...