Teaching "Writing Fiction"

November 20, 2005

1–2 minutes

First off, I should say that I came into graduate school as a “creative writer,” writing poetry. And I’ve written poetry and fiction, and I still have some notion of doing so seriously…maybe, but my attention for the last decade has been in rhetoric and theory. During that time, I’ve taught creative writing probably five or six times, though not in a few years. Reading over the texts I might use, I am reminded again of the general antipathy writers seem to feel toward theory. Now I’ve met many writers who don’t feel this way, but this general sense does seem to come out in texts (e.g. Gardner’s Art of Fiction).

Despite coming into the field through creative writing, I never had this reaction to theory. I suppose b/c my intertest in poetics was in how language functioned–

Hurricane Sandy Personal Loan

as a cultural, historical, and technological mechanism imbued with ideological power

as a rhetorico-aesthetic practice that is beautiful, persuasive, instructive, etc.

as an embodied-material, evolutionary, non-“human”/unconscious adaptation, a human quality akin to beaver dams, spider webs, beehives, anthills, etc.

It is this last that continues to interest me the most as unexplored territory. The danger is to “naturalize” language in some form of naive realism (again this is what Massumi discusses). However, beyond that is the investigation of language/writing as materiality constituitive of thought/consciousness, rather than ancillary to it.

In my opinion, the best writers–philosophers, poets, novelists–of the last century have recognized and explored this issue through stream of conscious, surrealism, drug-use, experimental and aleatory methods, meditation, and other means. I suppose if there is a thread running through my work of the last dozen years or so, it is thinking about how these explorations impact teaching writing, particularly in the context of new media.

Anyway, I’m going to have to figure out a way to present this all to students.

#plaa{display:none;visibility:hidden;}

4 responses to “Teaching "Writing Fiction"”

mafiacomp

November 22, 2005 at 6:52 pm

In my opinion, the best writers–philosophers, poets, novelists–of the last century have recognized and explored this issue through stream of conscious, surrealism, drug-use, experimental and aleatory methods, meditation, and other means.
Yes, and how does all of this square with teaching professional writing? Doesn’t “professional” discourse itself sometimes — oftentimes –presume a naive realism vis-a-vis language? Doesn’t it often suppress the experimental and “insane”? Doesn’t it deny poesis?
How does it all square, looking backwards, forwards and then now?
Writerly theory vs. readerly theory would seem a good distinction to make. Poesis vs. critique …

LikeLike

Reply
compmafia

November 22, 2005 at 8:15 pm

By the way, I don’t think it’s meant to ever square. I think it’s meant to remain one big conundrum.
Though, how about asking how professional discourse(s) is/are constitutive of consciousness … and materiality?
Clear, concise, controlled capitalism — the real 4C’s.

LikeLike

Reply
Alex

November 25, 2005 at 10:27 am

No doubt Mafia. This brings us back to our last exchange on the issue of professional writing and cultural studies.
Like you, I have no expectation that these things will all “square.” I would suggest that one could make a convincing argument linking the authorial romanticism familiar to MFA programs to the transparent communication familiar to technical-professional writing. They both support concepts of author-as-master, originality and intellectual property, and audience as passive recipient.
Clearly there are notable exceptions to this in both fields, but this is generally what one would encounter, I believe.
Professional “discourse,” indeed the notion of discourse itself, suggests to me the cybernetic-ideological function of language. As such, discourse is the name for the apprehension of compositional events onto a plan(e) of organization. Thus it is constitutive of materiality in two ways:
1. It organizes our epistemology and establishes protocols by which we, as interpolated subjects, are able to interface with information.
2. Discourse provides a command and control (i.e. cybernetic) function over micropolitical mechanisms that seek to regulate the unfolding of the compositional process.

LikeLike

Reply
robert

November 30, 2005 at 1:37 pm

In some respects, the issue might be “difficulty,” in fiction.You might check out Ben Marcus’ long, long recent Atlantic Monthly attack on Jonathan’s Franzen’s view of the contemporary novel.

LikeLike

Reply

Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence