CREATIVE WRITING

AND THE
NEW HUMANITIES
Paul Dawson
Creative Writing and the
New Humanities

‘It is rare to have a text that not only meets a very real need academically,
but one that is written with heartening persuasion and clarity. This is clearly
excellent scholarship.’
David Morley, Director – University of Warwick
Writing Programme

‘Distinguished by its attention to the interplay between Creative Writing and

other disciplines, Dawson’s study should both enlarge and enliven the discipli-
nary conversation.’
Jim Simmerman, Northern Arizona University

‘The approach to the subject is lively and impeccably researched as well as

highly engaging . . . I think this book is essential and timely reading.’
Julia Bell, Birkbeck, University of London

Discussions about Creative Writing have tended to revolve around the peren-
nial questions ‘can writing be taught?’ and ‘should it be taught?’
In this ambitious new book, Paul Dawson carries the debate far beyond
the usual arguments and demonstrates that the discipline of Creative Writing
developed as a series of pedagogic responses to the long-standing ‘crisis’ in
Literary Studies. He traces the emergence of Creative Writing alongside the
New Criticism in American universities; examines the writing workshop in
relation to theories of creativity and literary criticism; and analyses the evolu-
tion of Creative Writing pedagogy alongside and in response to the rise of
‘Theory’ in America, England and Australia.
Paul Dawson’s thoroughly researched and engaging book provides a fresh
perspective on the importance of Creative Writing to the ‘New Humanities’
and makes a major contribution to current debates about the role of the writer
as public intellectual.

Paul Dawson is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of New

South Wales.
Creative Writing and
the New Humanities

Paul Dawson
First published 2005
by Routledge
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Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 Paul Dawson
Typeset in Baskerville by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloguing in Publication Data
Dawson, Paul, 1972–
Creative writing and the new humanities/Paul Dawson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language – Rhetoric – Study and teaching.
2. Creative writing (Higher education) 3. Humanities –
Study and teaching. I. Title.
PE1404.D386 2005
808′.042071 – dc22 2004011298

ISBN 0–415–33220–6 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–33221–4 (pbk)
For Vanessa
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: building a garret in the ivory tower 1

1 From imagination to creativity 21

2 Disciplinary origins 48

3 Workshop poetics 87

4 Creative Writing in Australia 121

5 Negotiating Theory 158

6 What is a literary intellectual? 180

Conclusion: towards a sociological poetics 205

Notes 215
Bibliography 218
Index 245
Acknowledgements

This book is based on a doctoral thesis written at the University of

Melbourne. I would like to thank Professors Ken Ruthven and Chris
Wallace-Crabbe for their supervision throughout my candidature.
My thanks go to the following people for their help with this project
at various stages throughout the years: Denise Anderson, Ruth Blair,
Anne Brewster, Scott Brook, Suzanne Eggins, Nicholas Horne, Peter
Kuch, Jan McKemmish, Diane Parker, Kate Parker, Fiona Ring,
and Liz Thompson. I am grateful to the academic readers for
Routledge, whose comments were encouraging and very useful in
helping me revise my manuscript for publication. Most of the ideas
in this book were originally tested over seven years of conferences
for the Australian Association of Writing Programs. The response
from participants at these conferences provided an invaluable forum
to test and develop my ideas. I am indebted to my parents, Helen
and David Dawson, for their support. Finally, my greatest acknowl-
edgement must be reserved for my wife, Vanessa, whose unwavering
support is a daily blessing, and for whom my love is boundless.

Sections from this book have been published in different form in

Cultural Studies Review, Westerly, and Southern Review. A condensed version
of Chapter 4 originally appeared in ‘Creative Writing in Australia:
The Emergence of a Discipline’, TEXT 5.1 (2001) <http://www.gu.
edu.au/school/art/text/april01/dawson.htm>. Sections of Chapter 3
and the conclusion originally appeared in ‘Towards a Sociological
Poetics’, TEXT 7.1 (2003) <http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/
april03/dawson.htm>.
Introduction
Building a garret in the ivory tower

Once seen as a peculiarly American phenomenon, Creative Writing

has developed an increasingly international presence in the last
decade. Writing programmes are now entrenched and growing in
Australian and British universities, have a strong presence in coun-
tries such as Canada and New Zealand, and are also developing in
Asia-Pacific countries. Owing to its immense popularity with students,
and a growing sense of professional awareness amongst teachers,
Creative Writing has increasingly and inevitably become the subject
of research interest, as academics draw upon current literary and
cultural theory to develop new pedagogical methods, and to examine
the role of Creative Writing in the contemporary humanities.
Despite this popularity and interest, perceptions of Creative Writing
both within and outside the academy continue to be framed by an
outmoded scepticism. Since the inception of writing programmes
the most prominent discussions about Creative Writing have been
concerned with its legitimacy as an academic discipline. These discus-
sions have tended to revolve around a simplistic polemic, manifested
in the perennial question, can writing be taught? and its corollary, should
it be taught? As a result much that has been written about writing
workshops assumes the form of either a denunciation or an apologia.
The question of whether writing can be taught not only manifests
a concern about the limits of education, but continues the debate
about the relative merits of native talent and acquired skill which has
occupied commentators on literature since antiquity. Today’s version
of this ancient debate is played out entirely in regard to writing work-
shops, acquiring a hitherto unheard of institutional context. This raises
the question of whether writing should be taught, a question which
betrays an anxiety about the location of attempts to teach writing: the
university. The debates which revolve around these questions rest
upon a conception of Creative Writing as a formal institutionalised
2 Introduction
apprenticeship for literary aspirants and as a sort of surrogate patron-
age system for established authors. Such an understanding is founded
on the assumption that the social practice of writing, the ostensibly
placeless activity of literary production, has been somehow absorbed
or colonised by the academy, typically after the Second World War.
This narrative of absorption has led to an institutionalisation of the
traditional rivalry or animosity between writers and critics, a profes-
sional division which, in America, Christopher Beach characterises
thus: ‘PMLA and Critical Inquiry versus Poets and Writers and AWP
Chronicle, PhD versus MFA, literature faculties versus creative writing
faculties’ (1999: 31). This perpetuates an intellectual and theoretical
division between the creative practice of writing and the scholarly or
critical study of literature. ‘To this day,’ David Galef claimed in 2000,
‘a tacit war exists between literary critics and writers, though both
usually publish and teach within the same department’ (169).
In order to overcome this divide and circumnavigate unpro-
ductive debates about whether writing can or should be taught, it is
necessary to reconceptualise Creative Writing, in terms of both its
historical origins and its current state as an academic discipline.
Creative Writing functions as a discursive site for continuing debate
over some of the foundational questions of literary studies: what
is literature, what is the nature of the creative process, and what is
the relationship between the creative and the critical? It is possible,
then, to see the pedagogical strategies which underpin writing work-
shops themselves as responses to these foundational questions. As
a result I intend to approach Creative Writing not as a practice
(creativity), or as a synonym for literature, but as a discipline: a body
of knowledge and a set of educational techniques for imparting this
knowledge. If the historical examinations of the discipline of English
which accompanied the ‘crisis’ in English Studies throughout the
1980s came to any conclusion, it was that English has never been a
stable discipline, and has always been riven by internal conflict. The
history of Creative Writing needs to be seen as a series of educa-
tional responses to this perennial ‘crisis’ in English Studies, rather
than an apprenticeship which developed alongside and largely
untouched by Literary Studies.
There are three crucial turning points in the history of English
Studies which I shall demonstrate have borne upon the development
of Creative Writing. The first is the debate between scholarship and
criticism in American universities in the early part of the twentieth
century. This was a result of attempts to replace historical and philo-
logical research in departments of English with a literary criticism that
 Introduction 3
evaluated literature in terms of its aesthetic qualities, and enabled the
academic study of contemporary (Modernist) literature. It saw the pro-
fessionalisation of criticism by divorcing it from the public act of
reviewing, and the institutional entrenchment of the New Criticism as
a pedagogical practice by the middle of the century. The second is
the rise of ‘Theory’ as an international lingua franca in the humanities:
that collocation of anti-humanist discourses, imported from largely
Continental extra-literary disciplines, which was deployed to challenge
the authority of ‘practical criticism’ in English Studies and its
construction of literature as a privileged aesthetic category.
‘The lurid rhetoric of crisis’, Jonathan Culler wrote in 1988,
‘seeks to transform our situation from a hapless, even ridiculous diffu-
sion to a decisive, focused condition of choice’ (43). This rhetoric of
crisis, so prevalent from the 1970s to the 1990s, where Literary
Studies was continually described as a discipline in chaotic flux,
became an enabling device, charting the path towards a disciplinary
refiguration of English Studies. If a crisis is a turning point, then the
anxiety generated by Theory can be said to have passed to the extent
that we now exist in a post-Theory academy, evidenced by books
such as Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (1999), What’s Left of
Theory? (2000) and After Theory (2003). This does not mean that we
are comfortably posterior to this crisis, but that its effects are now
being worked through.
For instance, the ‘canon debate’, which was a product of the curric-
ular revisions effected by the crisis in English Studies, lies at the heart
of the so-called ‘culture wars’ that raged throughout the 1990s. In
his book Beyond the Culture Wars (1992), Gerald Graff saw a resolu-
tion to the canon debate in ‘teaching the conflicts’. This emphasis
on teaching rather than on criticism demonstrates the shifting nature
of crisis, from disciplinary challenge to institutional revision. The
result of the culture wars has been that a sense of crisis is now gener-
ated not only by internal intellectual debate (the need to move beyond
Theory, embodied in the interdisciplinary enterprise of Cultural
Studies), but also by external challenges. These challenges have taken
the form of anti-political correctness media campaigns which flared
in the early to mid-1990s, but still simmer in the division between
academia and the public sphere, as well as institutional pressures
which have affected the university as a whole.
Since the 1980s, dwindling public funds have forced university
administrations to develop executive models based on the private
business sector. Marginson and Considine have called this new
model the Enterprise University, an institution which ‘joins a mixed
4 Introduction
public-private economy to a quasi-business culture and to academic
traditions partly reconstituted, partly republican, and partly broken’
(2000: 236). The ‘corporatisation’ of universities has generated a
schism between their academic and adminstrative sections, such that
research and teaching are now compelled to adapt to a growing
culture of managerialism and economic accountability, as well as
responding to the demand for vocational outcomes for students and
a declining job market for academics. The effects on the humanities
of these institutional changes can be seen in books such as Higher
Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities
(1995), The University in Ruins (1996) and Day Late, Dollar Short: The
Next Generation and the New Academy (2000). The crisis resulting from
these internal and external challenges tends to revolve around the
notion of a public intellectual, a figure which must be seen less
as the product of nostalgic yearning for a mythical public sphere
than as a discursive site around which debates about the role of the
humanities in a public institution circulate.
My aim is to locate the disciplinary development of Creative
Writing within this history of crisis. Creative Writing first developed
disciplinary identity in American universities alongside the New
Criticism, in mutual opposition to scholarship in English Studies.
Writing programmes expanded at the same time as the rise of Theory,
but became entrenched in opposition to it as a means of retaining
this disciplinary identity. This is because Theory called into question
the privileged category of literature, the raison d’étre of Creative
Writing. D.G. Myers has produced the only substantial account of
this history, with his book The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since
1880 (1996), and to a large extent I shall not question his research.
Myers’s history, however, ends with the discipline of Creative Writing
turning into a collection of programmes; with its ‘professionalisation’
in the 1970s as an ‘elephant machine’, a production line which
produces not writers, but more teachers of writing and more writing
programmes. This narrative serves ultimately to align Myers with
standard critiques of writing workshops. Apart from displaying a
sympathy for Creative Writing’s ‘original’ intention of combining the
study of literature (criticism) with its practice (creativity) for a human-
istic understanding of literature ‘for its own sake’, Myers’s nostalgia
is apparent in his discontent with an academy ‘sicklied o’er with
the pale cast of “theory”’ (1996: xiii). In other words he does not
provide an up-to-date account of Creative Writing. Nor does he
suggest possibilities for its future, except that Creative Writing can
somehow help repair a three-way schism in the academy between
 Introduction 5
writing programmes, composition and critical theory if it recovers its
original integrative function.
In order to show how Creative Writing might be able to nego-
tiate the upheavals in disciplinary knowledge and curricular structure
since the advent of Theory and Cultural Studies, I will turn to the
development of the discipline in Australia. This did not begin until
the end of the 1960s, occurring alongside the introduction of Theory
to Australian universities as part of an interdisciplinary challenge to
existing literary education, and developing in a far more haphazard
fashion than in America. This history provides a useful case study
of the international emergence of Creative Writing in the decades
since the rise of Theory. My aim is to examine how the relationship
of Creative Writing to English Studies suggested by this history might
point to ways in which the discipline can adapt more successfully
as a site of intellectual work in the ‘post-Theory’ academy, known
in Australia as the ‘New Humanities’.
In order to situate Creative Writing within a discipline that has
shifted from ‘practical’ criticism to ‘oppositional’ criticism, and an
institution which now speaks of producing public intellectuals rather
than disinterested scholars, and in order to promote the importance
of literary works to disciplinary knowledge and to public debate, I
feel that writers need to be conceived as intellectuals alongside others
in the academy. What form a literary intellectual might take in the
age of postmodernity and in an era of blurred generic boundaries
and hybridised genres, and what role Creative Writing can play in
the formation of literary intellectuals is, ultimately, what this book
hopes to explore.
I do not wish to assert that Creative Writing has not had a genuine
impact on the profession of authorship (by offering employment
and training to writers) or on the production of literature (through
its impact on publishing). I am suggesting, however, that this under-
standing does not adequately describe its operation as an academic
discipline or its relationship to literary studies. Instead of resting
on an assumption that writers were absorbed by the academy,
the account of the historical origins of Creative Writing which I
shall provide is a means of enquiring into how it came to serve the
needs of writers in terms of apprenticeship and patronage, into
what institutional and theoretical negotiations were required for its
establishment. This historical investigation is also a methodological
device for reconceptualising Creative Writing as an academic disci-
pline in order to explore more comprehensively its relationship to
English Studies.
6 Introduction
If Creative Writing is not to be seen as the institutional absorp-
tion of literary production into the academy, but as an academic
discipline which developed as a series of pedagogical responses to
the perennial crisis in English Studies, then we must ask different
questions from the ones we are asking: (1) instead of asking whether
writers need formal training or whether teaching the craft is helpful
for writers, and instead of producing more handbooks on the craft
of writing, we must ask what are the theoretical underpinnings of
the practical writing workshop, what are the assumptions about liter-
ature which allow writing instruction to take place; (2) instead of
questioning the academic rigour of the writing workshop, we must
ask what constitutes knowledge in Creative Writing, and how does
work produced by teachers and students in Creative Writing (i.e.
their ‘research’) contribute to knowledge in Literary Studies – and
this also means asking what is the function of literature in modern
Literary Studies; (3) instead of bemoaning a split between writers
and critics we must ask what position of literary authority can the
writer assume in the academy, not as an artistic practitioner, but
as an intellectual? In order to clear a conceptual path for these
questions, however, we must explore the assumptions about Creative
Writing which organise our current understanding of the discipline.

Can writing be taught?

The question, can writing be taught?, tends to be posed as a challenge
rather than as a genuine enquiry; a challenge which threatens to
damn the foundational premise of Creative Writing by daring the
addressee to answer in the affirmative. This display of pedagogical
anxiety about a university subject has overshadowed an earlier one,
expressed in the question can literature be taught? In his inaugural lecture
in 1913 as the first Professor of English at Cambridge University,
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch reminded his audience that ‘some doubt
does lurk in the public mind if, after all, English literature can, in
any ordinary sense, be taught’ (1946: 13–14). He pointed out that
‘by consent of all, Literature is a nurse of noble natures, and right
reading makes a full man’, and that the study of literature found a
place in universities due to the conviction that ‘Literature is a good
thing if only we can bring it to operate on young minds’ (12). The
rise of English Studies was dogged by the pedagogical challenge of
how to bring literature to operate on the minds of students. The
study of literature was first conducted as historical and linguistic
scholarship precisely because of anxiety about whether it could be
 Introduction 7
taught in any rigorous academic fashion. The catchcry of criticism
in its struggle to replace scholarship as the dominant mode of teaching
literature was that it promoted the study of literature as literature,
that is, as an art. For John Crowe Ransom, ‘the students of the future
must be permitted to study literature, and not merely about litera-
ture’ ([1937] 1984: 95). The institutionalisation of criticism in the
university gave English departments an independent disciplinary
existence because it provided a successful means of teaching litera-
ture. The answer to the question of whether literature could be
taught, however, was that students were taught how to write criticism
of literature rather than to absorb scholarly knowledge about it. If
this is the case, Creative Writing might thus be seen as the teaching
of literature as writing.
But the question can writing be taught? has an older and non-
institutional heritage: it is the twentieth-century version of the ancient
aphorism, poeta nascitur non fit, or, ‘poets are born, not made’, recast
as a sceptical question. In his Art of Poetry, Horace writes that

The question has been asked whether a fine poem is the product
of nature or of art. I myself cannot see the value of application
without a strong natural aptitude, or, on the other hand, of native
genius unless it is cultivated – so true is it that each requires the
help of the other, and that they enter into a friendly compact
with each other.
(1965: 93)

What Horace is suggesting here is that a poet must possess natural

talent, although this talent needs to be cultivated. While he empha-
sises the importance of labour and study, he does not argue that ‘art’
can lead to the development of talent. According to William Ringler,
a commentary on this work around the year 200 by the Latin gram-
marian Pseudo-Acro provides the origin of the phrase poeta nascitur
non fit. It enters the English language in the Elizabethan period
through the influence of Continental writings; although, as Ringler
points out, it does not appear in this ‘precise order of words’ (1941:
497) until the time of Coleridge, who uses it in his Biographia Literaria
to explain the qualities of the imagination. For Ringler, the ‘appear-
ance or non-appearance’ of this phrase ‘in the critical works of any
period serves as a barometer indicating the presence or absence of
ideas concerning inborn talent or genius’ (503). While the phrase is
familiar to readers today, it is more common to see its variation,
‘you can’t teach writing’ or, in its interrogative form, ‘can writing
8 Introduction
be taught?’ The simple reason for this is that the latter is always
brought up in reference to Creative Writing programmes, which did
not exist before the twentieth century.
What is the relationship between poeta nascitur non fit and ‘can writing
be taught?’, and what is the reason for this change in phraseology?
Immanuel Kant shifts the ancient debate about the role of art and
learning in the production of poetry by suggesting, not only that
poetry is a product of genius, but that it is defined by the fact
that it cannot be taught. In his Critique of Judgement Kant argues that
genius ‘cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about its product,
but rather gives the rule as nature’ ([1790] 1952: 169). The prime
characteristic of genius, then, is originality, and its opposite is
imitation. By describing learning as a form of imitation Kant is able
to distinguish between fine art and science. Science, as a form of
learning, differs by degree from imitation, but differs in kind from
the original genius which guarantees fine art. Whereas the work of
even a brilliant scientist such as Newton can be learned, ‘we cannot
learn to write in a true poetic vein, no matter how complete all the
precepts of the poetic art may be, or however excellent its models’
(170). Newton could make ‘intuitively evident and plain to follow’
all the steps which led to his great discoveries. No poet, however,
‘can show how his ideas, so rich at once in fancy and in thought,
enter and assemble themselves in his brain, for the good reason that
he does not himself know, and so cannot teach others’ (170). Here
Kant is inverting Plato’s criticism of poets by celebrating their lack
of knowledge, making this a guarantee of genius. The difference
between science and art, then, is manifested in terms of pedagogy.
And this is why science can continue to make advances in knowledge,
while works of art do not become progessively greater.
What must be noted here, however, is that while someone may
learn how a scientific theory was produced, this does not mean they
will be capable of producing one themselves. We cannot make a
Newton any more than we can make a Shakespeare. The question
of whether writing can be taught, then, is really a question of what
can writers, as writers, tell us about literature? To assert that writers
cannot explain their creative process is to assert that writers cannot
tell us anything about literature, they can only write it.
While the phrase ‘poets are born, not made’ refers to the industry
of the poet, the debate over whether writing can be taught places
emphasis on the pedagogy of the instructor; it is the same argument,
but with a different emphasis. This debate, and phrase, takes shape
in a form familiar to us with the exchange between Sir Walter Besant
 Introduction 9
and Henry James at the end of the nineteenth century. Walter Besant
was a minor British novelist and man of letters who founded the
Royal Society of Authors and did much to champion the profession
of authorship. In 1884 Besant delivered a lecture at the Royal
Institution entitled ‘The Art of Fiction’. His first point was that fiction,
like painting, sculpture, music and poetry, should be considered an
art form. Like these arts, he said, fiction ‘is governed and directed
by general laws; and . . . these laws may be laid down and taught
with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspec-
tive, and proportion’ (1884: 3). Of course, like all art, ‘no laws or
rules whatever can teach it to those who have not already been
endowed with the natural and necessary gifts’ (4). Besant was not a
literary critic, however. He wanted to improve the position of the
author in society. He claimed that novelists enjoy no national distinc-
tions or honours as in every other profession or art. They have no
associations, no ‘letters after their name’ (5). Even those who appre-
ciate the novel could not bring themselves to afford it the distinction
of an art form. He says:

How can that be an Art, they might ask, which has no lectures
or teachers, no school or college or Academy, no recognised
rules, no text-books, and is not taught in any University? Even
the German Universities, which teach everything else, do not
have Professors of Fiction, and not one single novelist, so far as
I know, has ever pretended to teach his mystery, or spoken of
it as a thing which may be taught.
(7)

Besant decried the idea of the time that anyone could sit down
and write a novel, their skills being ‘acquired unconsciously, or by
imitation’ (7). His earnest exhortation was that for those who are
‘attracted to this branch of literature . . . it is their first business to
learn’ the ‘laws, methods and rules’ which govern the genre (7).
According to David Lodge, ‘if anyone deserves the title “Father of
Creative Writing Courses” it is he’ (1996: 173). Besant was not,
of course, advocating a Creative Writing degree. His point was that
if the novelist’s craft was taught in a university, by writers, then, as
with other arts, fiction would have greater credibility in the public
sphere. The presence of a university in the realm of literature would
influence public perception of authors and hence increase their profes-
sional and social standing. Nonetheless, he hoped that ‘one effect of
the establishment of the newly founded Society of Authors will be
10 Introduction
to keep young writers of fiction from rushing too hastily into print,
to help them to the right understanding of their Art and its princi-
ples, and to guide them into true practice of their principles while
they are still young’ (1884: 27). What makes Besant’s lecture different
from an ars poetica of previous centuries is that it is backed up by an
institution devoted to the professional status of authors.
This lecture inspired Henry James’s famous riposte of the same
name, in which he claimed that while fiction is indeed an art form,
its laws cannot be laid down; the novel is an organic form incapable
of dissection and the only rule to be observed by the novelist is that
it be interesting. James employs a Kantian line when he claims
that the novelist’s ‘manner is his secret, not necessarily a jealous one.
He cannot disclose it as a general thing if he would; he would be at
a loss to teach it to others’ ([1884] 1972: 33). In 1899 Besant published
The Pen and the Book, ‘written for the instruction and the guidance of
those young persons, of whom there are now many thousands, who
are thinking of the Literary Life’ (v). Everything from a writer’s
lifestyle to the editing and publishing procedures are covered in this
book. ‘In treating of Imaginative Literature,’ Besant writes, ‘one thing
is most certain that, without the gift, it cannot be taught’ (73).
In his 1902 book, A Study of Prose Fiction, Bliss Perry mused over
‘the question first brought before the public by Sir Walter Besant’s
lecture upon “The Art of Fiction,” namely, whether that art can be
taught’ (296). The debate over whether writing can be taught takes
shape out of practical rather than philosophical concerns (such as
those which occupied Kant). It develops when formal attempts to
teach writing begin at the end of the nineteenth century; either by
laying down guidelines for technique in handbooks, or criticising
manuscripts in workshops. It is a self-conscious debate, an attempt
by teachers of writing to pre-empt scepticism about their pedagogical
enterprise, a scepticism encapsulated in the phrase ‘poets are born,
not made’. At the same time that Besant was writing, handbooks
on play-writing and especially short-story writing were beginning
to emerge in America. These were anticipated by an English text,
Playwriting: A Handbook for Would-Be Dramatic Authors, in which the
anonymous ‘Dramatist’ set the tone for following handbooks when
he claimed that ‘I could roll off fifty or a hundred neatly-turned
instructions for you here, but they would no more teach you to write
a play than a treatise on navigation would help a landsman to handle
a yacht. Beyond a few rudimentary hints and technical rules, which
we will discuss hereafter, nothing can be taught, no help can be
given’ (1888: 12). In 1929 Stewart Beach prefaced his book, Short
 Introduction 11
Story Technique, with this defensive claim: ‘It is often asserted that
short-story writing cannot be taught, and I am so thoroughly in
agreement with the statement that I feel this book requires some
word of explanation’ (iii). By 1960 Archibald Macleish could write
with a certain degree of playfulness, ‘[e]verybody knows that “creative
writing” – which means the use of words as material of art – can’t
be taught’ (88).
The irony of the debate over whether writing can be taught, which
was triggered by the rise of Creative Writing, is that most writing
courses themselves tend to operate with the notion of innate talent,
claiming only that talent can be nurtured in a sympathetic environ-
ment: a community of writers where the practical skills of literary
craft can be taught, and where students can become better readers
of literature and better critics of their own work. In fact, it is common
for classes in Creative Writing to regulate enrolment numbers by
requiring the submission of a folio which displays creative potential.
The first Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, held at a
summer school in 1939, was ‘open only to students who can present
evidence of their ability to participate’ (Iowa University 1939: 1).
The official position of the Workshop is still characterised in these
terms: ‘Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that
writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption
that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limi-
tations as a school in that light.’1 If writing cannot be taught, however,
of what worth is Creative Writing to aspiring writers and to the study
of literature? This leads to our second question.

Should writing be taught?

There are two sides to the debate about whether Creative Writing
should be taught in universities: the first is a concern about the
external influence of writing programmes on literary culture; the sec-
ond about its internal relationship to academic research and teaching.
Workshops are often considered to have a homogenising effect on
students’ work, thus inhibiting genuine creativity (in other words,
original and individual expression). This is because critical decisions
about a manuscript are arrived at by class consensus, supposedly influ-
encing students to write in order to please their tutor and peers. The
other reason is that ‘workshopping’ operates negatively, by warning
students to avoid certain practices, such as adjectival floridity, and
hence promotes an easily teachable style of writing. ‘We teach how
not to write’, Richard Hugo claims (1979: 64).2
12 Introduction
The first side to the question ‘should writing be taught?’ concerns
both the usefulness of writing programmes for aspiring writers and
their influence on the publishing industry and the general state of
literature. Creative Writing is blamed on the one hand for giving
false hope to aspiring writers, since most graduates do not go on to
become successful authors. On the other hand Creative Writing is
blamed for producing too many authors, to the extent that gradu-
ates of writing programmes dominate mainstream literary culture in
America. In a sense, the doubt generated by the question of whether
writing can be taught is ironically answered in the affirmative by
this concern. What enters here are questions of value; work is being
successfully produced and published, but it lacks literary quality. This
is evidenced by the prominence of Creative Writing as a scapegoat
in contemporary debates about the ‘death of poetry’ in America.3
The most common complaint arising from these debates is that the
‘workshop’ poem which dominates contemporary poetry is a bland
and unambitious free-verse lyric focused on an epiphanous moment
of quotidian experience, with an autobiographical association encour-
aged between the speaker and the poet. It is also argued that despite
the fact that more poetry is being published than ever before, it does
not address the general reader, but rather is confined to an audience
within the professional industry of writing programmes and their
attendant readings, prizes, publishing houses and tenure-track jobs.
The workshop poem has also been the target of avant-garde move-
ments, with both Language poets and the New Formalists defining
themselves in opposition to the mainstream American poetry pro-
duced and perpetuated by Creative Writing. Spokespersons for these
movements argue not only that writing workshops produce outmoded
free-verse confessional lyrics, but that they are at the hub of an exclu-
sionary network of publishing and grant-funding departments. Two
recent books on the state of contemporary American poetry, Vernon
Shetley’s After the Death of Poetry (1993) and Christopher Beach’s Poetic
Culture (1999) accept this characterisation, seeing the future of poetry
in a move away from the deleterious effects of writing programmes.
The same complaints are made in regard to fiction. In 1983 Granta
devoted an issue to what it called ‘dirty realism’. This phrase was
used in the editorial by Bill Buford to describe the ‘fiction of a new
generation of American authors’ who wrote about ‘the belly-side of
contemporary life’ (5). This generation, Buford claims, were influ-
enced by writers such as Raymond Carver and Frederick Barthelme
who dealt with the minutae of life in ‘a flat, “unsurprised” language,
pared down to the plainest of plain styles’ (5). By the 1990s complaints
 Introduction 13
were being levelled at writing workshops for producing a new
generation of writers influenced by Carver and writing technically
competent but bland and soulless minimalist prose, with largely objec-
tive realist observations about the minutiae of everyday existence.
John W. Aldridge’s 1992 book, Talents and Technicians, is perhaps the
best known of these critiques. What lies behind all these criticisms
is the assumption that writing cannot really be taught, and hence
should not be.
The second side to the question, ‘should writing be taught’, involves
an anxiety about the effects of writing workshops on university educa-
tion, manifested in concerns about academic rigour. Where once
English was criticised for its vague belle lettrism and dismissed as mere
chatter about Shelley, a poor man’s classics, or a woman’s subject,
Creative Writing now operates as the soft alternative to an increas-
ingly rigorous Literary Studies. Recalling his early teaching career,
Theodore Weiss claimed that one occurrence which was considered
‘barbaric and outrageous – after all, what studious length of years,
what scholarship, research, rigors, had hallowed it? – was the intru-
sion into the university of the creative writing workshop’ (1989: 150).
Wilbur Schramm, first director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was
compelled to defend the discipline as ‘comparable both in quality
and in severity with the discipline of any other advanced literary
study. The graduate student would not find a good play, or novel,
or book of verse an easy substitute for the usual thesis or dissertation’
(1941: 190).
As writing programmes expanded throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
however, opposition came not from scholarship or criticism but from
Theory. In ‘English departments all across the United States at the
present moment,’ Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh claimed
in 1988, ‘a political rapproachment is being negotiated between
traditional humanist scholar-critics and creative writers’ (160). Writing
workshops, they argue, ‘are founded upon a set of assumptions that
have all been put in question by postmodern critical theory’ (155).
This set of assumptions is said to ensure the workshop’s complicity
in the maintenance of the capitalist state. However, there is not so
much a demonstration of political commitment as there is of profes-
sional castigation at work in their claim that ideas such as ‘voice’ or
‘originality’ are academically outmoded, and in their provision of a
long list of theorists which students ought to read. Eve Shelnutt,
a teacher of Creative Writing herself, claimed that writing workshops
shelter students from ‘the broader intellectual life of the university’
(1989: 9), discouraging them from seeing themselves as thinkers, and
14 Introduction
refusing to come to terms with exciting changes in literature depart-
ments, specifically those wrought by poststructuralist theory. Concerns
in Australia about the academic rigour of Creative Writing are
currently manifested in debates about the incommensurability of
‘creative’ work with standard definitions of research as they relate
to university funding and postgraduate study.
What is at stake here is not only the nature of creative work, but
ideas of its proper place. Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ is instructive
here because it opposed nature to the academy as the best teacher
of the poet. In the third book, ‘Residence at Cambridge’, Wordsworth
writes of ‘A feeling that I was not for that hour, / nor for that place’
([1850] 1950: 509). Instead, he called on the earth and sky to ‘teach
me what they might; / Or, turning the mind in upon herself, / Pored,
watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts’ (509). In other
words, while the university is a place of learning, the imagination
which Wordsworth seeks to develop through nature cannot be taught.
One could argue that this is Wordsworth’s own peculiar experience,
but he of course is a crucial part of the canon, a representative writer
the study of whom perpetuates Romantic concepts of creativity in
the academy.
The fact that English is constructed as the professional domain of
the critic contributes to the idea that the academy is an anomalous
location for writers. If the writer cannot contribute to disciplinary
knowledge, a critic might ask, what is the point of Creative Writing?
It is little wonder, then, that the presence of writers and of a profes-
sionalised discipline for their reproduction within the academy is
a major source of consternation in discussions about Creative
Writing. Not only are writing programmes seen as anomalous, but
the work they produce, literature, has traditionally been perceived
as placeless.4 Regardless of writers’ occupations, their ‘creative’ work,
supposedly, is not tied to their specific location (even though expe-
riences of this may form the basis of their writing) because it is
generated by their creative impulse and addresses an abstract general
audience. Hence when writers become physically located within the
university and their ‘creative’ work (as the equivalent of academic
research) is produced to maintain this position, literature itself is seen
to be tied to an institution. What requires challenging here, if we
are to examine ways in which Creative Writing can contribute to
intellectual work in the contemporary humanities, is the pervading
influence of the two metaphors which encapsulate popular under-
standings of the location of both writers and academics: the garret
and the ivory tower.
 Introduction 15
The garret and the ivory tower
A garret is the clichéd writer’s retreat. It conjures up images of a
solitary author eking out a bohemian existence in order to gain the
distance necessary to comment upon his or her surroundings or
simply to indulge a creative impulse. The metaphor of the garret
assumes that writing takes place outside society before it is released
into the public sphere for critical scrutiny, via the machinations of
the publishing industry. The word came to be associated with poets
in the mid-seventeenth century, around the time that Grub Street
acquired its reputation as a place for literary hacks in England. As
a result it has always been associated with hardship and penury.
Thomas Brown (1663–1704) self-parodies his profession in ‘The
Preface’ by drawing attention to the harshness of the poet’s life,
forced to scribble ‘Dogg’rel and News’ for a living:

I am closely block’d up in a Garret,

Where I scribble and smoak,
And sadly invoke
The powerful assistance of CLARET,
Four Children and a Wife,
Tis hard on my Life,
Beside my self and a Muse,
To be all cloath’d and fed.
(Literature Online)

Despite its operation as a cliché (see ‘The Poetaster’ by John

Byrom), there has always been a certain romanticism attached to the
garret. This is made explicit in Mark Akenside’s ‘The Poet . . . A
Rhapsody’ (1737). In this poem Akenside draws attention to the fate
‘of the Muse’s son, / Curs’d with dire poverty! poor hungry wretch!’,
before going on to suggest that manual labour is impossible for the
poet: ‘Oh! he scorns / Th’ ignoble thought; with generous disdain,/
More eligible deeming it to starve, / Like his fam’d ancestors
renown’d in verse’ (1996: 395). In the eighteenth century the word
‘garreteer’ developed, to mean ‘an impecunious author or literary
hack’ (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)), but Akenside’s poem demon-
strates that the inhabitance of a garret can be seen as a mark of
poetic authenticity: ‘These are his firm resolves, which fate nor time,
/ Nor poverty can shake. Exalted high / In garret vile he lives’ (395).
Perhaps the most extreme and romantic account of the self-
sufficiency of the writer is a poem by Emily Dickinson written circa
1863:
16 Introduction
Publication – is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man –
Poverty – be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly – but We – would rather

From Our Garret go
White – Unto the White Creator –
Than invest – Our Snow –

Thought belong to Him who gave it –

Then – to Him Who bear
Its Corporeal Illustration – Sell
The Royal Air –

In the Parcel – Be the Merchant

Of the Heavenly Grace –
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price –
(1970: 348–9)

In this poem the garret is linked to creativity (it is where the writer
composes), and to poverty (the writer is isolated and unrewarded by
society). This isolation, however, is the guarantee of poetic creativity.
The garret is opposed to publication (which is equated not with
dissemination, but with commercialisation), ‘the Auction of the Mind
of Man’. Poetry is a private circular communion with God, and
hence is its own reward. We can see here from its origin as a phys-
ical space in which the writer composed (a space which provided
cheap rent on Grub Street and a haven above the din of industri-
alised cities) the garret has come to denote a metaphorical space for
the creativity of the isolated author.
How does this idea of the garret relate to the clichéd domain of
the academic? ‘One of the most enduring popular myths of human-
ities research’, according to Meaghan Morris and Iain McCalman,
‘involves an egghead in an “ivory tower”’ (1988: 1). The ivory tower
denotes a physical space or state of mind which is removed from the
practicalities and harsh realities of everyday life. As a cliché, claims
Masao Miyoshi, it ‘is as taken for granted as the university itself’
(2000: 50). Its connection to the academy brings up associations with
both the idea of pure or basic research, where universities operate
as a haven for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and the