The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

The move toward creative writing is a positive one for English departments. For far too long, English departments have functioned as "Departments of Interpretation" while placing production under quarantine, both in the gehttoes of composition classrooms and the privileged marginality of creative writing programs. It's time for English departments to face the facts: Writing courses pay the bills. Writing, then, ought to be the central intellectual focus of English departments. Textual interpretation should operate in the service of textual production, not the other way around, as so often is the case now.

Can creative writing be "soft"? Can it lack rigor? Of course! But that's a matter of pedagogy, not a quality inherent in the activity. Literature courses can be soft too. I've seen Shakespeare courses where it's possible for students to get an "A" without ever reading any of the plays or poems and without ever writing a single word--critical, creative, or otherwise. I've also seen creative writing courses where students are required to write two complete drafts of a novel in the course of a semester *and* to analyze their writing in light of the ideas of Bakhtin, Derrida, and Watt.

As creative writing continues to grow, I believe it will develop a rich body of theory, scholarship, and pedagogy; this work, in fact, has already begun. But creative writing still has over century of institutional history -- in which textual production was made largely subservient to textual interpretation -- to overcome.

: -- Tim Mayers, Assistant Professor of English (Composition & Rhetoric), Millersville University (posted 3/15, 10:40 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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