Multilingual Matters Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (New Writing Viewpoints)

This book advances creative writing studies as a developing field of inquiry, scholarship, and research. It discusses the practice of creative writing studies, the establishment of a body of professional knowledge, and the goals and future direction of the discipline within the academy. This book also traces the development of creative writing studies; noting that as the new discipline matures - as it refers to evidence of its own research methodology and collective data, and locates its authority in its own scholarship - creative writing studies will bring even more meaning to the academy, its profession, and its student body. Review This is a stunning challenge to MFA Programs! While critiques to the workshop method have been commonplace over the past decade, Donnelly provides a compelling argument for the creation of a new academic discipline: Creative Writing Studies. Bringing intellectual rigor to creative writing programs will do more than provide a seat at the table of literary critics and composition scholars: it will reinvigorate the workshop method and creative writing classroom. This is a must read book for anyone serious about teaching writing. --Joseph Moxley, Editor, Creative Writing in America In a welcome addition to the field of creative writing studies, Dianne Donnelly has examined the theoretical bases of the prevailing pedagogies within the discipline. This book should be required reading for courses on creative writing pedagogy; for advanced students who hope to become academics in the field; and for those concerned with the future of creative writing as an academic discipline. --Nigel McLoughlin, University of Gloucestershire, UK Dianne Donnelly does a service to scholars in English studies by tracing in this important book the growth of creative writing scholarship, including relevant work by others alongside her own important investigation into the workshop. --Patrick Bizzaro, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA About the Author Dianne Donnelly is the editor of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010) and co-editor of Key Issues in Creative Writing (forthcoming). Her fiction and scholarship appear in numerous venues, and she is a frequent conference presenter on the subject of creative writing. She teaches at the University of South Florida where she is also the Associate Director of Composition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline By Dianne Donnelly Multilingual Matters Copyright © 2012 Dianne Donnelly All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-84769-590-1 Contents List of Figures, Acknowledgements, Introduction: The Emergence of Creative Writing Studies, Section 1 A Taxonomy of Creative Writing Pedagogies, Section 2 The Writing Workshop Model, Section 3 The Academic Home of Creative Writing Studies, Conclusion: The Legitimacy of Creative Writing Studies, References, CHAPTER 1 A Taxonomy of Creative Writing Pedagogies While the field of composition studies yields many useful taxonomies and axiologies on the teaching of writing, the field of creative writing studies is just beginning to emerge in this area of research. Composition's cognitive approaches, in particular, which sought correspondence between writing and learning and between how writers make decisions and choices in the writing process, might have served as a platform for parallel research in creative writing practice. It might have bridged a discussion from the writing and learning practices of creative writers to the ways in which we privilege certain teaching approaches and how these practices inform course planning, teaching strategies and classroom structure. Likewise, the field of literary studies has concerned itself with the research and study of literature from multiple (albeit conflicting) perspectives, presenting for creative writing, at a minimum, alternative methodologies