Creative Writing and Schiller's Aesthetic Education
by Peter Howarth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
was inspired to write "Kubla Khan" once
he woke from an opium-inspired dream, and Charles Dickens wrote
many novels as serial pieces that initially appeared in magazines.
Neither of these texts could have been fully governed by authorial
intention.
—Undergraduate essay for class entitled "Literary Theory"
Editing really helped me to express myself better and make sure that
the words I was using were truly my own.
—Undergraduate self-report on a creative writing assignment
For academics committed to the idea of an all-round aesthetic education,
one of the great successes of the last thirty years has been the tremendous
expansion of creative writing classes. It is now rare to find a literature
department in the United States that does not offer some creative writing
option, and it is increasingly becoming so in Britain and Ireland. But despite
the dramatic expansion of creative writing as an academic discipline, the
methods, ideals, and values of creative writing workshops have very often
been at odds with the theoretical approaches to literature being taught
by the rest of the literature department, not to mention elsewhere in the
humanities. Put simply, the traditional workshop aims to foster participants'
creative freedom so as to produce a well-formed piece of writing showing
appropriate control of tone, style, and register. Unlike the traditional
seminar, it does not usually ask students to analyze that writing in terms
of its historical background, sociopolitical significance, or linguistic
dynamics. The result has too often been an arts curriculum that is intellectually
at odds with itself and that encourages double-think in its students. As
readers might already have guessed, the two quotations above were written
by the same student, who is not untypical in happily writing about
Dickens's creative work in terms of its interaction with social forces while
writing about her own as if personal sincerity were what mattered. But if
students unconsciously code-switch according to which class they are in,
they are only reflecting the split within the academy that teaches them
the "yawning gulf dividing those who theorise or 'historicise' texts (i.e.,
critics) from those who produce poems or stories (i.e. 'creative writers')"
that the poet and critic Sandra Gilbert discerns. Shirley Geok-lin Lim,
another writer with experience in both fields, has described the current
situation in terms of the academic right hand of the teacher not knowing
what the creative left hand is doing.
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