The Place for Creative Writing (Hesse)

Hesse, Douglas. "The Place of Creative Writing in Composition." CCC 62.1 (Sept. 2010): 31-52.

Of course, composition studies is now large and complex. The field bobs and weaves between analysis (knowledge about) and performance (knowledge how), rhetoric and writing, concept and craft, critique and complicity, ends academic and ends civic, composing as an instrumental activity and composing as a socially ludic one, even as the stuff with which we might make texts has long since transcended alphanumeric print. (emphasis added, p 34)

A second reason, explored in part 3, focuses on the identity of composition studies per se, particularly what we take as the purpose and practices of courses from first-year comp through graduate studies. To state my concern (too) starkly: we're at a crucial professional juncture, needing to find a good mix between being "about" writing/composing (that is, as focusing on interpretation, on analyzing texts or other literate practices) and being "for" writing/composing (that is, focusing on production, on making texts). Obviously, this polarity can be thoroughly deconstructed ("analysis is productive," etc.). However, if we go far toward being "about" composing, we privilege students as scholarly interpreters and researchers in ways paralleling the ways literary studies initiates its students. While students having knowledge about composing is eminently worthy, ignoring different kinds of writing for wider audiences and purposes is marginalizing, especially when digital tools and networks expand the production and circulation of texts (35).

With important exceptions, our field has turned away from the imaginative and toward argument, civic discourse, academic genres, and rhetorical moves. Creative nonfiction is the clearest canary in the historical coal mine. (37) and CCCC still has a creative nonfiction special interest group; the 2009 meeting attracted thirteen people. (37)

The polite decline since then of creative nonfiction within composition studies leads to my third point: faced with deciding--as if there were some moment in which a choice was offered or demanded--among "rhetoric" (as argument and analysis"), "composition" (as academic discourse), and "writing" (the broader making of texts), composition studies chose the first two, at least as measured in the field's conference programs, journals, textbooks, and syllabi. The belletristic "personal" essay dwindled as an object of study or production except in the old guise of the narrative "mode" or the new school genre of literacy narrative. As "rhetorical situation" acquired more pedagogical power, later morphing into theories of discourse communities and genre, forms of writing that had no apparent rhetorical situation--except to acquire a readership--had little valence, especially when tainted by association with "the literary," as an emerging discipline bristled against its historical second-class status within English departments. (38)

My point is that a theoretical perspective that privileges writing-with-content or writing-as-rhetorical-analysis has little intellectual room for writing imagined not as a conversational turn on a particular subject matter but as a move in a Burkean parlor constituted differently. (40)

From a disciplinary perspective, then, it might seem best to have composition and creative writing continue to fork their separate paths. The former could maintain its serious practical focus on argument and idea, explanation and analysis, with the overt goals of shaping how people think and act. The latter could celebrate the aesthetic artifact, produced and read for pleasure--sometimes trifling, often serious--the artifact important for how it's made and experienced, important as much or more for what it is as what it does, written because its act of writing satisfies a creative, expressive desire that finds time spent writing preferable to time spent otherwise. That both composition and creative writing do their work mainly through words matters at the level of syntax and grammar, but not much further. (43)

I assert that composition should value dimensions of life in addition to work, school, and political action. There are dimensions of entertainment, engagement, or, more mundanely, simply how to pass time, and within these are realms of self-sponsored writing and reading. Now it might be that these are not the concerns of composition, that developing individuals or human potential or the life of the pen and pixel as well as the mind are aspirations of a more naive field. It might be that composition studies has two prime purposes: (1) as agents of disciplinary and workplace interests, to discipline writers and readers in practical textual modes they wouldn't pursue on their own and (2) to inculcate broad rhetorical and critical facilities, advancing the civic and social good. (47).

But between Algernon Swinburne and Any Rand lie vast swaths of "creative writing" that shape what readers think and do--and satisfy their makers' desires, personal and social, to make texts with little explicit purpose beyond making them but with consequences beyond their simply having been made. (48)