Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin: A Foundation Reader

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE    Hebrew, Greek and Roman

THE OLD TESTAMENT

Genesis: Chapter 1

Exodus: Chapter 20

PLATO (c. 428–427 BC)

Ion (translation by Benjamin Jowett)

The Republic (Translation By Benjamin Jowett)

ARISTOTLE (384-322 BC)

Poetics ( C.330 Bc) (Translated By S. H. Butcher (1850-1910)

Rhetoric (335 Bc) (Translated By W. Rhys Roberts 1858-1929).

HORACE (65–8 BC)

The Art Of Poetry (C. 15 Bc) (Translated Into English Verse By John Conington 1825-1869)

LONGINUS (ascribed to, fl. 1st century AD)

On The Sublime (Translated By. H. L. Havell)

PLOTINUS (3rd century AD)

An Essay On The Beautiful (Translated By Thomas Taylor 1758–1835)

PART TWO    Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533–1592)

Of the Force of Imagination (1580)

GEORGE PUTTENHAM ( –1590)

The Arte Of English Poesie (1589) (In The Original Spelling)

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554–1586)

An Apologie For Poetrie/The Defence Of Poesie (1581)

FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626)

The Advancement Of Learning (1605)

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Sc. 1)

BEN JONSON (1573–1637)

Timber, Discoveries Made Upon Men And Matter (1641)

JOHN MILTON (1608–1674)

Of Education (1644)

Areopagitica: A Speech Of Mr John Milton For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The Parliament Of England (1644)

JOHN DRYDEN (1631–1700)

Of Dramatick Poesie An Essay (1668)

PART THREE    Eighteenth Century

STATUTE OF ANNE (1709–1710)

ALEXANDER POPE (1688–1744)

An Essay On Criticism (1711)

JOSEPH ADDISON (1672–1719)

The Spectator, No 412, Monday, June 23, 1712.

ANNE FINCH (KINGSMILL), COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA (1661–1720)

Miscellany poems (1713)

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784)

Preface To A Dictionary Of The English Language (1755)

EDMUND BURKE (1729–1797)

A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful (1756-7)

EDWARD YOUNG (1683–1765)

Conjectures On Original Composition (1759)

IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804)

The Critique Of Judgement (1790) (Translated By J. H. Bernard)

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759–1797)

A Vindication Of The Rights Of Men (1790)

A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman (1792)

PART FOUR    Nineteenth Century

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1772–1850)

Advertisement To The Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Preface To The Edition Of 1800

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772–1834)

Biographia Literaria (1817)

JOHN KEATS (1795–1821)

Letters of John Keats, ed Forman, letter 90, Hampstead Sunday [21 Dec. 1817]

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK (1785–1866)

The Four Ages Of Poetry (1820)

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822)

A Defence Of Poetry (1840)

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

(review of ‘Twice-Told Tales’, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Graham’s Magazine, April, 1842

JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900)

Of The Pathetic Fallacy (1856)

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806–1861)

Aurora Leigh (1857)

JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900)

Lilies Of Queens’ Gardens (1864-5)

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822–1888)

The Function Of Criticism At The Present Time (1864)

ÉMILE ZOLA (1840–1902)

Preface to the second edition of ‘Thérèse Raquin’ (1868) (translated by L. W. Tancock)

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822–1888)

Preface To Culture And Anarchy (1869)

The Study Of Poetry (1880)

WILLIAM JAMES (1842–1910)

II. The stream of consciousness

WALTER BESANT (1836–1901)

The Art Of Fiction (1884)

HENRY JAMES (1843–1916)

The Art Of Fiction (1900)

PART FIVE    Twentieth Century

A. C. BRADLEY (1851–1935)

Poetry for Poetry’s sake (1901)

HENRY JAMES (1843–1916)

Preface To The Portrait Of A Lady (1908)

SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH (1863–1944)

On The Art Of Writing (1916)

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941)

A Room Of One’s Own (1928)

Postlogue

Further Reading

Envoi

It is only when the intellect is consciously directed to an examination of what the human mind produces, that we have criticism. There is a general impression that the same mind cannot do both the producing and the examining – that a mind is either creative or critical; or, in other words (to give scientific colour to the theory), it is either synthetic or analytic. The fundamental fallacy in the theory is that analysis is opposed to synthesis, the idea being crystallised by the employment of metaphors borrowed from the physical world – one is a tearing down, the other is a building up.

The fact is, however, that in mental operations analysis and synthesis presuppose each other; analysis, indeed, presupposing synthesis to a much greater extent than is the case in the reverse relation. Mere tearing apart is not analysis, for analysis implies a point of view; and the point of view is the synthesizing element. There is, therefore, absolutely no psychological basis for the absolute opposition between the creative and the critical mind.

David Klein, Literary Criticism from ‘The Elizabethan Dramatists: Repertory and Synthesis (Sturgis & Walton, 1910, pp. xi-xii)).

INTRODUCTION

In the past few years, British universities, polytechnics, schools and even kindergartens have seen a massive growth occur in a subject that not too long ago was regarded as a suspect American import, like the hamburger – a vulgar hybrid which, as everyone once knew, no sensible person would ever eat. It is called Creative Writing, and along with other latter day or postmodern activities like Media Studies and Women’s Studies, has turned into one of the subjects of the season. Besides achieving academic recognition, it has spread freely through the broader hinterland. Farmhouse seminars, weekend courses, evening writing workshops, postal courses and handy mercantile handbooks encourage all of us to develop the obscure quality known as creativity or stimulate the belief that we can all soon be running off with the Booker prize…

(Malcolm Bradbury, The Times Literary Supplement. January 17, 1992.)

In 2000, the British Council listed 40 postgraduate Creative Writing (CW) degrees in the UK. In 2003, a report produced by the English Subject Centre pointed to CW as a ‘rapidly expanding province of activity’.¹ In 2004 there were about 85 undergraduate English degree courses, where CW was a component.² At the time of writing this Introduction (2021), according to UCAS, the university clearing house for student admissions, there were 187 CW postgraduate and 562 undergraduate courses available. There are a few full CW undergraduate degrees, but more commonly, CW is combined with English. It has also become an option within a range of other subjects, from history to medicine.

It is clear from this expansion that CW is a success story in the academy. It has generated its own literature and pedagogic practices. It has a symbiotic, if sometimes vexed, relationship, with English Literature studies. The relationship between the reading and writing of imaginative literature is now pretty well accepted as axiomatic. However, the separate and interwoven histories of English and CW have meant that the latter developed at different times, and in different ways.

English Literature and the academy

³

In the US and the UK, arguments for studying literature in the vernacular (ie, English) language, were part of a move to challenge the dominance of the study of the ‘classical’ literatures of Greece and Rome. ‘London was the first University to introduce English and English literature into its examination system. University College was founded in 1826, Kings in 1829…In 1859…for the first time, English literature appeared in a BA course.’ ⁴

The validation of English as a subject of university study in the UK was supported by the University Extension movement. From the 1860s, Oxford, Cambridge and London University teachers organised extra-mural classes to provide further education for working people, those who may have had very little schooling. As the 19th century wore on, the UE movement argued ‘…with greater and greater indignation, that Oxford was gradually becoming the only institution in which English Literature played no part. The subject of English came into the Civil Service exams, it was among the papers set for the Oxford and Cambridge Local examinations…Above all, in the new Extension Lectures, so warmly approved of by the public, English literature was more widely followed than Science or History.’ ⁵

In the US, as D. G. Myers has pointed out, the arrival of English Literature in universities involved a combination of reading and critical study of literature, and courses in teaching academic writing – these were called Composition and Rhetoric, and are still taught today:

The story of creative writing began with the opposition to philology and resumes with the effort in the 1880s and 1890s to restore literary and educational value to the teaching of rhetoric…English composition was the first widely successful attempt to offer instruction in writing in English…it was formulated at Harvard in the last quarter of the century out of a constructivist belief that the ideal end of the study of literature is the making of literature…English composition established the autonomy of college writing and created a demand for courses in writing from a literary and constructivist point of view. And these were necessary preconditions of creative writing’s acceptance as a subject of serious study…Until about the 1920s, though, there was small need for creative writing per se because English composition and creative writing were one and the same thing.⁶

Teaching more directly vocational writing in the US came with the first journalism course in 1908. Teaching imaginative writing – CW proper – developed rapidly; the influential Iowa Writers’ Workshop was established in 1922–3. Its system of workshop-based teaching has influenced CW pedagogy all over the world.

In the UK the trajectory and time scale of CW were rather different. The University Extension movement’s classes focussed on literary ‘appreciation’, rather than writing. In the universities, appreciation developed into literary criticism, but, unlike in the US, without any teaching directed at writing practice. This difference between the US and the UK goes some way towards explaining why CW took longer to be established in the UK.

Creative Writing in the UK

During the 1950s and 1960s, novelist Malcolm Bradbury visited and taught in American universities, where he was aware of the existence of CW courses. In 1965 he took up a post at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, one of the new universities built in the 1960s. UEA helped to pioneer interdisciplinary and comparative literature degrees, with their School of English and American Studies, in 1968. Bradbury became Professor of American Literature in 1970. In the same year, he and fellow novelist, Angus Wilson, set up the first MA in Creative Writing in the UK.

Their MA had two agendas: first, it combined the reading and study of literature, with the writing of literature. Secondly, it was intended as a cultural intervention in what Bradbury and Wilson perceived as a crisis in the high-art British novel, as compared with its livelier American counterpart. In other words, their desire was to encourage new, younger writers to produce vigorous, new writing. The radical departure in academic terms was that, following the example of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, students were able to submit a ‘creative dissertation’ for their final MA degree.

The establishment of UEA’s MA signalled the arrival of CW in the academy, and its structure showed an understanding that reading and writing are (or should be, or must be) two sides of the same coin. This meant that ‘traditional’ Eng Lit academics began to explore the teaching of imaginative writing, alongside bringing in professional (and would-be professional) writers to teach their art/craft.

Undergraduate CW followed. In 1984, dissatisfied with traditional English teaching, Susanna Gladwyn began incorporating imaginative writing into her classes, with immediate success. Gladwyn was in touch with the Verbal Arts Association, chaired by poet and teacher, Anne Cluysenaar, and formed after a 1982 seminar on ‘The Arts and Higher Education’, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. A group of professional writers and radical academics (including Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart) called for ‘Urgent reforms… in the teaching of English if the practice of verbal arts is not to remain for most people a missing subject’. The VAA’s patrons included writers William Golding, Doris Lessing, Ted Hughes and Iris Murdoch. Susanna Gladwyn ran the first full CW undergraduate degree, called ‘Writing and Publishing’, at Middlesex University in 1991–2.

Creative Writing Pedagogy

Creative Writing has generated its own, now extensive, literature and pedagogical practices. The literature consists of a combination of how-to handbooks, and collections of essays by writers explaining how they approach their writing. The practical teaching methodology is largely built round the ‘workshop’, where students read their and each others’ creative work, which is then subject to peer and tutor criticism – ‘feedback’. There can be ancillary links to more ‘academic’ elements in other subjects – on research, publishing or aspects of literary and cultural study.

Students write ‘commentaries’ to accompany their creative work. These are called various names: self-reflective commentary, supplementary discourse, critical commentary, exegesis. They might include personal, individuated documentation: diaries, journals, work diaries/logbooks, along with discussions of writerly issues, their own practice, their literary context, and relevant ‘theories’ or theorisations, concerned with imaginative writing. For undergraduates, the final commentary might be 200–500 words, for MA up to 5,000 words, for PhD from 10,000 words, to half the final word length. Assessment weighting could vary from 10% of the final mark, up to 50% at PhD level. Students were/are rarely required to pass both ‘creative’ and ‘critical’ elements, showing that the ‘creative’ is valued more highly than the ‘critical’.

In 2003, the English Study Centre surveyed ‘Supplementary Discourses in Creative Writing Teaching’ (Project Supervisor Dr Robert Sheppard). The survey concluded that there was ‘little uniformity over the value, principles, aims, techniques, level descriptors, or assessment patterns and weighting, or even amount, of this writing’. There was little shared understanding across the academy of the conceptual and cultural foundations necessary to inform students’ accounts of their own writing processes, as well as the more scholarly, research-based literary critical elements.

However, in 2008, the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) produced the first specific Benchmark Statement for Creative Writing teaching and research in higher education. In 2016, NAWE, together with the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), produced an official Benchmark Statement, and this was updated in 2021. These are guidelines, and individual universities and tutors compose their courses in a variety of ways.

Undergraduates taking creative writing modules as part of their English degrees, are more likely to be au fait with the conventions of textual criticism/close reading and developments in critical thought, than many (if not most) postgraduate students, with writing ability and potential, but no grounding in literary education. It is common for students to be accepted onto postgraduate CW courses on the basis of their imaginative writing, not their educational history or qualifications. In terms of access to such art/craft study, this latter may be laudable, but it creates its own pedagogic problems.

In the case of both critical commentary and workshop practice, there is one abiding question: from where do students gain their knowledge of critical terminology, and/or a genuine understanding of the literary conventions within which they are working, let alone literary criticism and theory? For those with no prior experience of critical reading or literary analysis, it’s a matter of what they pick up in the workshop, or from aleatoric aspects of tutor supervision, or simply by dint of engaging with writing and response during their course. However, whatever this yields, it is likely to be piecemeal, rarely intellectually challenging, or considered that responses to imaginative writing are merely ‘subjective’. Critical thinking, an understanding of the history and practice of literary criticisms of different kinds are not available to them. Ways of thinking about writing, attempts to develop ‘theories’ of writing (conventions, ‘rules’, even) are rarely or automatically joined up.

This Reader

This Reader brings together many of the key elements in the symbiotic relationship between the reading and writing of imaginative literature in the academy. They are two sides of the same coin, although it took until well into the 20th century for them to be united. The anthology is also the final part of a trilogy of my critical/creative writing. The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else; Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) charted the histories of English and CW in the academy, with a thoroughgoing analyses of its principles and aims, and a critique of workshop practice. The Art of Writing Drama (Methuen, 2008) analysed the characteristics of drama as a written form, and challenged some of the predominant practices of teaching a performance-based genre.

My own imaginative (I avoid using the term ‘creative’ – since writing non-fiction is also, in a very real sense, ‘creative’) writing has always ranged over poetry, prose fiction and drama. I’ve written the latter for theatre and radio, with the occasional foray into television. I’ve also reviewed the arts, in print and on radio, written books and articles on music, gender and writing and women and drama. I am one of a large number of writers whose experience and income has been boosted by the arrival of CW in the academy. My CW teaching has ranged from playwriting in an adult education class, to drama students, and in a number of universities in all three imaginative genres. Like many professional writers, I had no previous experience of teaching, and to some extent, had to make it up as I went along, developing a pedagogic approach which turned out to be rather different from the dominant workshop method. Hence the above two books, and this Reader.

This Reader is not Theory (with a capital ‘T’) for Creative Writing. It is distinctive (if not unique) in that it bridges the gap between the practical handbooks for CW, and the many anthologies of literary and cultural Theory, which have developed from a combination of philosophy, sociology, politics and linguistics. While these latter anthologies can have relevance to the techniques and tropes of imaginative writing, they very rarely form part of CW courses. Mediating between these two extremes, this Reader presents carefully selected historical extracts, from the Old Testament to the borders of Theory.

It charts the ways writers and thinkers have considered imaginative writing through the centuries. Their aims and purposes have been varied; from a desire to understand how imaginative literature travels from the mind to the page, to trying to define ‘rules’ and conventions, and much more. For example, the Readings travel from Aristotle and the three unities, to the beginnings of the concept of ‘genre’; through the Renaissance, with its appeal back to classical rubrics and rhetoric, into the 18th century, with ‘genre’ as we now know it; then, via the belle-lettrism of the 19th century, the development of literary criticism, notions of ‘style’, value judgement, and finally, to Theory.

The Reader can be used in whatever way the autocritical, autodidacticism of lecturers and students decide, in their different CW contexts. It will provide historical and linguistic depth to many of the familiar mantras (cliches, even?) of CW. For example, one of CW’s most repeated rubrics, ‘write what you know’ might be explored through the conceptual line from the graven images of the Old Testament, via Aristotelian mimesis, to Romantic notions of individual emotional expression, and to categories of realism and naturalism. As something of a non-exclusive, non-exhaustive guide, each extract is followed by a cluster of ‘keywords’. Readers may – and should – perceive and list others for themselves. The aim of the anthology is to enhance thinking about writing, and thinking about thinking about writing, and, of course, to encourage further reading.

Conclusion

In 2004, I interviewed Anne Cluysenaar, pioneer of undergraduate CW at Lancaster and Sheffield Hallam universities. She set up a three-part degree course of linguistics, stylistics and creative writing.⁷ Further back in history, across the Atlantic, as part of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Norman Foerster, critic and historian, was ‘…hired in 1930 to assume control of the newly established School of Letters at the University of Iowa…creative writing at Iowa was never intended to become a free-standing apparatus of courses, an autonomously constituted workshop, leading to a separate degree. It was to