bridging the creative and the critical

CLAIRE WOODS

BRIDGING THE CREATIVE AND THE CRITICAL �

ABSTRACT. In this article I discuss ways of engaging teacher education students in writ-ing, reading and oral activities that lead them into an understanding of literary theories. Thenexus between the creative and the critical is developed in a program of writing and textbased activities where students are engaged as readers, writers, researchers, speakers andperformers. This is not a traditional or conventional Literary Studies program. Rather, itrecognises the potential of drawing a relationship between literary theory, rhetorical theory,cultural theory, media and text studies. Thus, students through their writing, reading, andspeaking practices are drawn into an understanding of texts, of style, of language use incontext, and of ‘literariness’ – the term used by Ronald Carter & Walter Nash (1995: 18)– to avoid an ‘absolute division between the literary and the non-literary’. Assessment viaPoster Presentation, Collaborative Dialogue, Viva Voce or Group presentation or perform-ance, as well as preparation of a Folio of creative and critical work enables students toextend their skills in different media. Students are invited to make the link between thecreative and the critical and thus it is hoped they will develop an understanding of thedegrees of literariness in language use of literary theory and of ways of engaging their ownfuture students in the world of texts – print, oral, visual and electronic.

KEY WORDS: literariness, literary theory, literature teaching, teacher education, teachingEnglish, writing

1. INTRODUCTION

In his book Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing,Australian writer and teacher Kevin Brophy discusses some of thecontinuing tensions evoked by the presence of Creative Writing withinthe academy (Brophy, 1998). These tensions arise as Creative Writingseeks a place within traditional Literature Departments or within depart-ments of Communication and Cultural Studies. Indeed, Creative Writing(or in the US context, composition/writing) as a practice within univer-sities gets caught in the verbal cross-fire as Literature and Communi-cation/Cultural Studies engage in disciplinary squabbles which, in somecontexts, divide and fragment the humanities. In others, reasonable debateleads to a fruitful redefinition of particular disciplinary interests and

� This article is based on a paper presented at IAIMTE Conference 99, July 14–16,1999, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature 1: 55–72, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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practices. In the Australian context, this has led in many instances to rede-fining and often renaming former English Departments (e.g. Communi-cation/Cultural Studies, Communication and Information Studies, Mediaand Communication) to reflect the interdisciplinary endeavours that haveemerged within the New Humanities.

Brophy argues not only for the importance of creative writing withinuniversities but also the imperative that Creative Writing should be taughtin close conjunction with Literature and Cultural Studies; “. . . it isimportant that creative writing students remain informed and engagedwith social-theoretical analyses of literature” (Brophy, 1998: 203). Hecontinues:

. . . if creative writing students are to maintain a level of sophistication and insecurityimportant to resisting rigidity in their approaches to writing they should be integrated withdepartments and courses focusing of literature and cultural studies. They share too muchwith these disciplines to be usefully divided from them. Separate schools, departments orfaculties of creative arts would eventually result in the debilitation of their discourse ofcreativity. (Brophy, 1998: 203)

Here Brophy asserts the importance of the creative and critical workingtogether in humanities education and particularly for students in CreativeWriting. Enter now for the purposes of this article, the student who mustundertake a disciplinary study as part of his or her degree in Educa-tion. At the University of South Australia these students are neitherCreative Writing majors nor necessarily Literature majors. Instead theyseek an appropriate disciplinary mix which will enable them to teachEnglish Language Arts in the school sector – primary (elementary) or highschools.1 They take a major in Communication: Writing and Language.This program gives them an opportunity to develop as writers while theyacquire knowledge and skills developed in English language, literatureand communication (including cultural and media) studies. As teachersof these future teachers we focus deliberately on negotiating and takingadvantage of the tensions between text studies and writing to whichBrophy refers.

To illustrate the components in developing a curriculum appropriate forfuture teachers of English Language Arts, I will describe one course in the

1 The State Education Department in South Australia, the main employing body, seeksteachers with a background that will enable them to teach English/Language Arts – stilldefined quite traditionally. However, teacher education students at the University of SouthAustralia take a discipline major not in English, but in Communication: Writing andLanguage. This multidisciplinary sequence of study is taught not in an English Departmentbut in a School of Communication, Information and New Media. (At the University ofSouth Australia, the School of Communication, Information and New Media long sincereplaced the traditional English Literature Department in both name and practice.)

BRIDGING THE CREATIVE AND THE CRITICAL 57

sequence of study. Students take the course, Writing and Text Workshop,in the second semester of their degree.2 The staff teaching the course areaware that the issues to do with the teaching of literature immediatelythrust us into the debates which have been integral to field of LiteraryStudies (English Studies) in Australia, North America, the UK, Australiaand New Zealand for the last 20–30 years. We also have the added dimen-sion of acknowledging the very particular pedagogical issues that relateto teacher education. In one sense, the process of teaching literature toteacher education students becomes an exercise in involving students inreflecting on and thinking about the process because they are involved aspractitioners in the very substance they are learning about.

Our teaching is built on a soundly theorised interdisplinarity and thereis a complementarity between our work and the various approaches toteaching literature taken by Corcoran, Hayhoe & Pradl (1994), Morgan(1994), Carter & Nash (1995), Pradl (1996), Kooy, Janssen, & Watson(1999). The author whose work has been particularly useful to us in ourcurrent endeavour is Rob Pope. His book Textual Intervention (1994) hassynthesised and reformulated for us much of the thinking and experiencewe ourselves have had in engaging students as readers and writers withtexts. And it is with this text and our own previous experiences as teachersand teacher educators that we have gradually evolved our current course.3

The focus is on writing and on reading as linked activities, but particu-larly on writing: on writing, not as a response after reading but rather as away of critiquing the text – so that the divide between the creative and thecritical is bridged. What the approach offers is a critical approach whichintroduces students inter alia to structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist,and post-colonial perspectives on text reception and production.

In this article I describe the creative-critical approach to reading andwriting in relation to literature. This involves students in responding withcreative interventions on an original text. I indicate the range of activ-ities and the assessment requirements in the Writing and Text workshopcourse. I illustrate the approach with a description of one student’s creativewritten response to a poem by Robert Browning. With this illustrationof the approach in mind, I then discuss the issue of building a theory ofliterature teaching and the ways in which the Writing and Text Workshopaims to allow students to experience a process that will enable them to

2 In the class, teacher education students join other students who are majoring inCommunication Studies and/or Writing or Multimedia. The range of students and theirdifferent interests is a vital aspect in the way the activities of the class evolve.

3 This has led to a fruitful collaboration with Pope at Oxford Brookes University, UK,and David Stacey, Humboldt State University, California.

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develop their individual theories theory of teaching literature, as well asan understanding of what it means to be an active reader and writer inresponse to literature.

2. TEXTUAL INTERVENTION

In explaining the creative-critical approach, Pope writes: “The best way tounderstand how a text works . . . is to change it: to play around with it, tointervene in it in some way (large or small) and then to try to account forthe exact effect of what you have done” (Pope, 1994: 1).

This is a creative-critical approach. Pope describes some of the possi-bilities:

. . . a range of interactive and inventive strategies in which readers are encouraged to engagein structured yet playful re-writing of any text they meet.

Such ‘textual interventions’ include: ‘re-centring’; ‘re-genreing’, the generation ofvarious kinds of ‘parallel’, ‘alternative’ and ‘counter-text’ (writing with, across and againstthe grain of the initial text) as well as exercises in paraphrase, imitation, parody, adaptation,hybridisation and collage. (Pope, 1994: xiv)

Textual intervention can begin at the word level – thus making a microchange to the original text. Or it can be a more substantial change – a macrochange whereby the reader creatively reworks the text to create a new text.As each of the changes is made the reader asks, ‘What difference does thismake in the way I read the text? What can I learn about the original text?’A micro change can be made at word or syntax level. Thus, for example,changing a pronoun might make a difference in how a poem might be readand interpreted. Student can also examine the impact of particular wordorder by re-writing a text. Macro change might involve students writing aparody or converting a prose passage to a play or film script. In doing thisthey must read, analyse and interpret the original text in order to create anew text.

This is the focus of the Writing and Text Workshop which teachereducation students take as a core component in their discipline studies inCommunication: Writing and Language. Through their participation in thecourse we hope our students come to see that both reading and writingare creative and active processes. The two processes become closely inter-twined as students play with a poem, an advertisement, a short story, or anovel. Let me describe how this works in practice for these students.


3. THE CREATIVE-CRITICAL IN PRACTICE

The Writing and Text Workshop class is always run as an interactive work-shop where students work in small groups or as a class, reading eachother’s work in draft, discussing poems or prose passages or newspaperarticles or novels. We, as teachers, bring into class a range of writing towhich we suggest students respond. We also expect students to read aheadin the text book (Pope’s Textual Intervention, 1994) week by week. Thebook offers many suggestions for ways in which students can intervenecreatively with a text – a poem, a prose passage, a newspaper advertisementor a passage from a play or novel. It becomes a compendium of usefulliterary examples as well as a source for creative writing activities. Weask that they try out some suggested writing activities on their own andmaintain a reading/writing journal as a repository for their ideas and exper-imental writing. They bring draft writing to the class, share their work withothers and seek peer comment and feedback. They read their work out loudto others, and bring into class the work of other writers they find intriguing.In short we expect that they will be involved in reading, writing and oralactivities much as they expect to implement in their own classrooms.

As teachers, we participate in the class, reading, writing and presenting.We establish activities for individual, pairs, small or whole group participa-tion. Students hand in work on a regular basis for us to read and commenton. For any work submitted during the semester for a formal response, weuse notional grades because we expect that they will later wish to revisetheir work before including in their folios for final assessment. We seeourselves as genuine readers of their work who can offer as do their peers,constructive critique.

Students are encouraged to read widely not only from the materialssuggested in the textbook, or by us, but also from their own adventurousreading. They are then encouraged to respond creatively in writing. Theyunderstand that any of their written responses might be submitted forassessment. Any of the weekly in-class exercises might be extended anddeveloped for submission as well.

There is a close link between the in-class activities, their writing/reading journal activities and their assessment. Assessment is based onthe submission of a Folio of revised and completed pieces of writing, acollaborative group Viva Voce activity, and a Poster presentation.

The activities and writing are designed to give students the opportunityto demonstrate a range of skills. First, they undertake weekly writingassignments. These are often derived from the short exercises suggested byPope and adapted according to texts and materials that we have collected.Students test their skills in rewriting texts with perhaps a micro or a macro

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change. For example, they might read a poem or a short prose passageor a newspaper article or a short story or a chapter from a novel. Theythen respond to it by perhaps re-writing it as a parody, re-making it forperformance or altering the focus by writing from the point of view of aminor character. This writing is brought to class for workshop discussionand for sharing with others.

Later they revise and often extend these pieces and make them readyfor inclusion in their final writing Folio. The Folio must contain at least3000 words of polished writing and must include a major piece of creativewriting. This might be for example a script, a poem – or set of poems –or a short story. Second, we offer students a chance to work with a partneror in a small group of three or four to read and then write and performa new text based on some kind of intervention with the original text. Wedescribe this activity as a Collaborative Vive Voce. Here they must choosea text (e.g. novel, short story, poem, scene from a play, newspaper article)and together they create a ‘textual intervention’, which they read aloudor perform. We arrange for each pair or group to present their work to theclass. They must also offer reflective and theoretical comment on the natureof the intervention and the resulting text. They lead the class discussionon their intervention. We are interested in hearing what they understandabout the original text, having undertaken the rewriting process. We alsovalue their reflections on the shared process of reading, interpretation andwriting. The rest of the class offers feedback and frequent applause forsome often genuinely surprising and creative work.

Third, we adopted from our own experiences of professional confer-ences the idea of the Poster session. In this activity students must create aposter in which they demonstrate their understanding of a theoretical issuethey have explored during the course. The posters are hung in a classroomand all students are invited to present their poster to the class and answerquestions, as one would in a professional conference session. Thus wemight see students discussing intertextuality or Bakhtin and dialogism andillustrating the issue or concept with reference to a range of texts and theirown writing. The poster is assessed as an assessable piece of writing.

Finally, students submit a Folio of polished work including short piecesderived from the set writing activities. The Folio must also include amajor piece of creative writing, which the student has developed from theirreading of a text (short story, dramatic script, poem, written/visual collageetc.). I include an example of such a major piece here in which EmmaBarber creates an insightful reading of Robert Browning’s poem To MyLast Duchess with a piece of creative writing (see Appendix for the fulltext).


4. STUDENT AT WORK

One of the sets of activities suggested by Pope involves students inter-vening with Browning’s poem in various creative ways. Emma was in hersecond year at University when she took the Writing and Reading Work-shop – one of the mandatory courses in the Communication and Writingsequence which teacher education and other students take within theirdegree. In her final Folio for assessment, she submitted several short piecesof creative work demonstrating her capacity to intervene with a variety oftexts either at a micro or macro level. For her major creative submission,she chose to intervene on Browning’s poem. Her intervention was in factto make an entirely new text using the original as a catalyst. In doing this,she provides a particular perspective on the poem and indeed on the centralcharacters – the Duke and his young wife – the ‘Last Duchess’ of the title.

In her intervention, Emma chose to re-centre the text, writing from theperspective of a hidden character – the painter (Fra Pandolf) employed bythe Duke to capture the young duchess on canvas. In Browning’s poem, theportrait painter is mentioned only once by name and his work as a painteris of course assumed, not described, that is, the portrait at the heart of thepoem is evidence of his labours. In her piece, Emma turns the painter’seye on all that might have occurred in the Duke’s house. She comments ina note at the end of her paper: “Portraiture, the art which captures beauty‘like caging a butterfly’ ”. Her reflection here is as much on the techniquesof portraiture as on the theme of poem.

Emma delivers her interpretation of the poem by focussing attentionon the painter’s techniques and skills. We see a possible scenario of atraumatic relationship between the Duke and his young wife as the painternotes the paints and tints and textures he will employ to capture a truthabout the Duchess: “her face must be painted in the favoured style – mixrosa with a white tint for the cheeks, this will give the ideal cherubic flush.Her skin must be pure white, with rosybuds. Do not be exact, ignore thosescars and bruises.” The painter’s consideration of the options available tohim illuminates the hidden, the unspoken verities of the situation. At thesame time, Emma has Fra Pandolf musing, almost sotto voce, on his tech-nique but also on the situation he observes, as he proceeds with his task.The painter’s notes reveal one set of observations; his asides (in italics)offer reflections on the relationship between the Duke and his wife.

See how the husband paces like a dark shadow, behind her.Use white tint for the pupils to brighten saddened eyes and make innocent those eyes

that are shadowed with guilty sin. Make her eyes sparkle more than those diamonds uponher bosom, for that will indicate her inner spiritual richness.

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Vacant portholes of an abandoned ship are her eyes. They are swimming with tears andold ghosts. (extracts from Barber, 1998)

By creating a new text based on the original, Emma suggests a differentway of reading the Browning poem. She also creates a new work that canstand on its own.

5. BECOMING A TEACHER – BUILDING A THEORY OF TEACHING

I noted above that we are concerned with the teaching and learning processitself being in one way a meta-commentary-in-practice for the content,knowledge and understanding which we intend students to take with themas teachers in their own classrooms. It is not sufficient that we see thiscourse as a discipline study isolated from the issues of pedagogy andcurriculum with which every teacher is concerned. What therefore are thebuilding blocks?

These are multiple and linked in vital ways. First, there is a theoryof teaching and learning – a pedagogy demonstrated in practice in theWriting and Reading workshop. Second, there is a theory specificallyabout the teaching of literature. This implies, thirdly, a theory aboutreading and writing and about how this might be taught. Finally, it alsoimplies a theory about the teaching of literary theory. In Writing andText Workshop, we are conscious of these different elements and attemptto address them as we put our theories of literature, of text productionand reception, and of pedagogy into practice and as we invite students tounderstand the process of engaging with texts.

5.1. Theory of Learning and Teaching

Every teacher needs to develop a personal theory about what it meansto learn and therefore what it means to teach. Linda Flower has writtensuccinctly: “Teaching is a theory-building enterprise. That is, it is ahypothesis-creating, prediction-testing process that leads to the framingand reframing of action. Theory building is an act by which teachersconstruct an imagined frame for actual pedagogy” (Flower, Wallace,Norris & Burnett, 1994: 3). More recently, Gutierrez, writing of teacherpreparation and professional development in general but with particularreference to the issues of cultural diversity, has written: “Reflective andsituated practice – practice that shapes and is shaped by the local context– should help teachers develop more useful and robust theories of studentlearning” (Gutierrez, 2000: 293). She writes that teachers need “ongoingopportunities in collaborative and supportive environments to examine


their current and emergent theories of teaching and learning in practice”(p. 293).

5.2. Theory of Teacher Training

Teaching is not learned by reading about teaching or being told aboutteaching. Rather, one develops as a teacher in the classroom – one developsknowledge from the very practice of teaching and from being in situationswhere old scripts about teaching can be questioned. Knowledge arises fromthe activity of teaching – this is “situated cognition” (Lave & Wenger,1991). We ask, How can teacher education students ‘construct an imaginedframe’ for the teaching of reading, writing and of literature? And how canthey do this in a collaborative and supportive situation?

Certainly, they begin to do this when they undertake an in-schoolpracticum during their studies. However we also believe it is importantthat within the discipline area classes, they have an opportunity to beinvolved in processes and activities that they themselves might use in theirclassrooms. Putnam & Borko assert the importance of “authentic activ-ities” as vital in teacher education (Putnam & Borko, 2000: 4).4 Putnam &Borko amplify the concept with reference to A. Brown et al. (1993):

Authentic activities foster the kinds of thinking and problem-solving skills that areimportant in out-of-school settings, whether or not the activities themselves mirror whatpractitioners do. Our discussion of authentic activities for teacher learning adopts a positionsimilar to that of A. Brown and colleagues; that is, we consider the kinds of thinkingand problem-solving skills fostered by an activity to be the key criterion for authenticity.(Putnam & Borko, 2000: 5)

In our class, we want teacher education students to see us as teachersmodelling ways of interacting with texts and of engaging them, ourstudents, as readers and writers. We want them to be engaged in situatedlearning and thus in activities that they can acknowledge as authentic whenthey themselves become teachers. We believe in praxis – performance andpractice linked to theory. Such praxis also needs to be reflexive. We wantthem to be deeply engaged in a purposeful way in the act of reading andwriting. Thus we want them to be challenged to think critically and differ-ently about texts and about themselves as readers and writers. We also wantto make explicit to them the way we, their teachers think about not onlyabout the process of engaging with texts and language but also about theprocess of being teachers in a reading/writing classroom.

4 The term adopted from J.S. Brown et al. (1989) is defined as “ordinary practices ofa culture – activities that are similar to what actual practitioners do” (Putnam & Borko,2000: 4).

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5.3. Teaching Literature

Much has been written about teaching literature (see, for example, Sumara,1996; Pradl, 1996; Corcoran, Hayhoe & Pradl, 1994; Kooy & Wells, 1996;Wilhelm, 1997; Rogers & Soter, 1997; Hines & Appleman, 2000). It isalways a topic of discussion and debate. Judith Langer writing in 1992was adamant about, “The need to reexamine the role of literature in theeducational experience of young people . . .” (Langer, 1992: 51). Currentresearch by Van der Hoeven of four high school teachers and their practicesin teaching literature suggests that the need for such examination continues(Van der Hoeven, 1999).5

Langer described the teaching of literature at the time she was writingas “rudderless” and without a strong conception of how literary under-standings might emerge in instructional contexts (Langer, 1992: 51). Sheoffers the following points in a proposal for literature teaching. She argues:

(1) that literature is indeed a distinct way of knowing, with its own special orientationtoward meaning;(2) that processes of understanding literature have distinct patterns that provide a way tothink about the kinds of questions we ask and the support we provide; and(3) that by modifying our approaches to instruction in particular ways we can moreeffectively support the teaching and learning of literature. (Langer, 1992: 35)

She uses a phrase I find useful and appropriate to the approach we take. Sherefers to readers as “reaching toward a horizon of possibilities” (Langer,1992: 37). In the Writing and Text Workshop our students stretch intodifferent possibilities – not by writing standard critical essays in responseto their reading but by experimenting with creative interventions whichgive them a chance to see literary works from different perspectives.

In the same volume, Probst notes that “Teachers can make the point thatthere are many ways of entering texts and that we may profit by broadeningour repertoire” (in Langer, 1992: 73). He suggests that by finding differentways to ask questions about texts we can engage students differently withliterature. His emphasis seems to be weighted toward the teacher asking thequestions rather than students posing them for themselves. Neverthelesshis point is a sound one, that is, that in the classroom we should seekdifferent ways of questioning texts.

Our approach in Writing and Text Workshop is to put the force of ques-tioning in the hands of students via the writing/reading activities they areasked to do. The role of the teacher as the keyguide to a text is thus substan-tially diminished. The traditional claims of the centrality of the text as the

5 Van der Hoeven is currently carrying out doctoral research at the University of SouthAustralia.


source of meaning and of the teacher as the key to that meaning are alsopotentially dislodged. We take advantage of the shifts in literary criticaltheory. So too does Wendy Morgan who, writing in 1994, argued againstthe traditional paradigm of literature teaching. As she notes:

Despite the vigorous and accessible arguments of a writer like Terry Eagleton (1983) andthe experiments of some secondary English teachers, our theory and practice of teachinghave not undergone any significant modifications to accord with theories of readingresponse or poststructuralist insights into the cultural production of literature. (Morgan,1994: 168)

From a slightly different perspective, but still focussing on the limitationsin teaching literature, Denis Sumara revisits Susanne Langer to emphasisethe way in which “schooling marginalizes the experience of engagementwith the literary work of fiction” (Sumara, 1996: 23). Schools tend touse instrumental discourse and deny the possibilities of what Langer callsthe “formulative power of words” as distinct from “the communicative”function of the literary text: “It is the communicative function of languagethat makes the actual world’s appearance public and reasonably fixed. Theformulative power of words it the source and support of our imagination. . .” (Langer in Sumara, 1996: 22). The reader (suggests Langer) interactswith the text. This generates “a virtual reading experience” – by which shemeans an “original production” – an experience which is prompted by theimagination at work in a “formulative space”. Thus Sumara explains:

It is only in this formulative space, which is less determined than the communicative space,that the imagination is invoked and the aesthetic experience realized. The formulative, thenas related to the experience of the virtual, blurs the boundaries between textual imagespresented by the author and the interpretations of these images made by the reader. (Sumaraon Langer, 1996: 23)

We asked ourselves when we established this course: How do we enableteachers to avoid the marginalising such ‘virtual experience’ when theyteach literature? At the same time, being aware of what literary theoriesreveal about texts and textuality, we ask: How do we enable teacher educa-tion students to understand the insights derived from post-structuralistliterary theory; that texts are constructed and contingent; and that readersand writers are socially and culturally situated? In short how do we bridgethe creative and the critical? How do we open up the world of texts so thatstudents question the concept of ‘literature’ as “a sacred body of texts”(Schilb’s words, 1996: 43)?

In 1994, Morgan suggested the need for a massive paradigm shiftwhereby “our texts, classroom contexts, and students’ readings could lookradically different . . .” (Morgan, 1994: 166). She called for a new meth-odology of English teaching “based on our understanding of theories of

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reading and textual constructedness”. Further she asserted “. . . we need tooffer our students a new paradigm for understanding themselves as readersand writers engaged in discourse” (Morgan, 1994: 168). In Writing andText Workshop, we position students as active writers and readers of textsor, as Dias suggests, as readers who “. . . become active performers of textrather than passive receivers”. The kinds of activity we invite them into (inDias’s words) “goes much beyond decoding meaning; it involves ascribingintentions, considering analogical situations, and attending to the feelingsand association called up during the reading, including memories of othertexts” (intertextuality at work!). He goes on: “It is an act of analysis aswell as an act of composing, of ‘writing’ the text” (Dias, 1992: 134). Thenexus between the analytic/critical and the creative is crucial to what we doand we intend that our students will carry into their classrooms a differentparadigm for teaching literature.

5.4. Understanding Literary Theory

We want our students see theory as useful to them in their practice asteachers. We understand that they are not going to specifically teachliterary theory but it should inform their pedagogy. Peter Barry says it thisway: “. . . we are looking, in literary theory, for something we can use, notsomething which will use us” (Barry 1995: 8). We want students to lookclosely at texts from different perspectives and to apply a critical frame totheir reading of any text.

One way into this is of course to ask them to ‘play’ with the text– alter it at either micro (word, sentence) level or at the macro (struc-ture, organisation) level to investigate the intentions of the author and themeaning-making of the reader (as Emma did with her writing). In doingthis they tune into the making of the text as a literary artefact and thus into“style as a textual phenomenon” (Carter & Nash, l995: 15). Texts workin contexts. Contexts include social structures and cultural organisations,which imply ideologies and particular world views which are of courserepresented in texts. Carter and Nash explain:

To study ideology and its representation requires close attention to language and style.The particular focus, however, needs to be on the intermeshing of language and style inthe context of social systems and institutions. Ideologies cannot be unmasked by linguisticanalysis at a single level or with reference only to decontextualized sentences. Our view ofstylistics with its attention to whole texts in context and to the context of communicationsbetween a writer (speaker) and reader (listener) is well-placed to try to reveal the ways inwhich writers exploit linguistic structures in order to address reader/subject of the discourseand ‘subject’ him/her to a particular way of seeing (and believing). (Carter & Nash,1995: 21)


An extension of this perspective on texts and contexts is that the notion ofwhat is ‘literary’ is challenged. Thus the issue becomes one of “degreesof literariness” for much depends on how the text works in context withlanguage/style which is “received” by the reader as “poetic” (Carter &Nash, 1995: 16ff.).

Our students work with texts of all kinds. We like to adopt the pre-eighteenth century view of literature as designating “all available writing”(Milner, 1996: 1), rather than that which has become accepted specificallyas “well-written books of an imaginative or creative kind” (RaymondWilliams quoted in Milner, 1996: 1). Thus students read writing ofall kinds – poetry, personal columns advertisements in the newspaper,travel accounts, plays, novels, letters. In doing so, they explore the way“language can be exploited” by the writer and “the way readers of textscan be exploited by the language” (Carter & Nash, 1994: 24). It is this‘seeing through language’ which is illuminated as students play with texts,and intervene with a text in order to re-write and thus create differenttexts. Students are thus not simply critical readers, they are creative writers.However, they must also be creative readers whose critical capacities areenhanced by the creative re-shaping of the base-text.

A mission statement produced by the English department at the Univer-sity of Maryland and quoted by Jon Schilb in his book Between the lines:Relating composition theory and literary theory (1996) reflects a stancewith we are comfortable. It reads:

We are an English department in a public university with particular opportunities andresponsibilities. Our mission is to communicate through research and teaching to students,colleagues, and the wider community how diverse cultures understand and represent them-selves through words, texts, and images; to develop an appreciation of the connectionsbetween such material and public life; to create a dynamic environment conducive tocreative an critical thought and a passion for continuous learning; to foster inquiry andthe development of reading and writing skills. (in Schilb, 1996: 47)

If our students could enter their future classrooms with such a missionstatement underpinnning their teaching, we would be delighted. And thuswe approach Writing and Text Workshop as a dynamic place for ludic andcreative possibilities alongside deliberate critical readings.

5.5. Developing as Writers and as Readers

We are deeply interested in the interplay between the reader and the writeras well as with the way in which being involved reading and writing andperforming texts can illuminate what each process means. Thus we wouldhave students understand that as readers they are engaged not passivelybut critically ‘composing’ or in Ian Reid’s terms-involved in a narrative

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exchange which is both constructive and reconstructive work such as onemight find in an atelier (Reid, 1992: 16). Reid writes: “Reading is a craftof composition, a practice of frame-making that overlaps with the artist’screative labour. By bringing interpretive frames to bear on a text, its readeractively draws it elements into a significant configuration” (Reid, 1992:16). Pradl also refers to the role of the student reader in the ‘literaryconversation’: “The literature lesson, as I see it, is very much about eachstudent’s evolving answer to the ongoing saga of ‘what kind of reader amI?’ ” (Pradl, 1996: 137).

In Writing and Text Workshop, we want to say that it is very muchabout each student evolving an answer to this question while practisingto discover ‘What kind of writer am I?’ The two roles go hand in hand.Carter & Nash also comment on this interrelationship: “Informed readingis part of the discipline of becoming a technically competent writer, andintelligent writing is a useful element in the education of an appreciativewriter” (Carter & Nash, 1995: 204).

A productive tension between the creative and the critical canbe constantly explored by the deliberate exploitation of reading/re-writing/writing/ reading activities. It is this territory which others havealso described. For example, Corcoran describes the way a classroomcan be reshaped to take into account cultural theory and engage studentsin strategies for re-writing, resisting and contesting texts thus enablingthem to reflect on their ways of reading, and on the ways texts work. Heconcludes: “I hope I have hinted at the ways in which a reading/writingclassroom can capture some of the productive tensions involved in the dualcentering of reader an cultural context demanded by reader – oriented andcultural version of literary theory” (Corcoran, 1994: 23).

What we see in many of the activities described for a reconfiguredliterature classroom is an element of playfulness in writing and reading.Petrosky suggests indeed that teaching literature should be seen as a ‘fieldof play’ rather than as teaching about a body of knowledge about literature(in Langer 1992: 170). It is certainly the case that the sort of activities andpractices he describes are those found in many English classrooms for thepast 20 years or more. Whether they are practised by teachers with a strongsense of the ideological or cultural critique which underpins Corcoran orMorgan or Pope’s or our own work is perhaps less certain as Van derHoeven’s current research reveals.

6. CONCLUSION

Writing and Text Workshop is a demanding course. Students becomeimmersed in textual possibilities. They read texts in ways they have never


done before simply because they have been invited to ‘intervene’ withthe text to explore in a different way. As writers they become creativeand critical readers of texts. As readers they read as creative writers.They are artisans who work as “imaginative readers and active re-writers”(Pope’s words). They come to an understanding of how literary theory caninvigorate reading and writing.

Umberto Eco encapsulates the process of reading a text by re-writingor intervening in the text, when he writes:

Every text, after all . . . is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work. Whata problem it would be if a text were to say everything the receiver is to understand – itwould never end. If I were to phone you and say, “I’ll take the highway and be with you inan hour,” you would not expect me to add that I shall use my car along the highway. (Eco,1995: 3)

What we ask is that our students react to a text as if it were a lazy machineabout which they can say something because they have approached thetext as writers and not just as readers. The interplay between writer, readerand text is thus illuminated and exposed in creative and critical ways. Wehope that our students begin to develop their theories for teaching literatureand language. Perhaps these students will enter their future classroomswith an approach to literature that allows for Susanne Langer’s ‘virtualreading experience’ a wholly original production – as well as a criticalunderstanding of texts and their place in the world.

APPENDIX

The Complete Text of Emma Barber’s Creative Piece Based on My LastDuchess, by Robert Browning

Notes on Fra Pandolf’s ‘The Beautiful Duchess of Milan’First Sitting – 2 hours

• by sliding the back of the hand over the canvas one can feel if it hangs loosely or isstretched too taut.

• if the model is a slender woman she should perch elegantly on a simple chair, turningsideways so the light strikes her bone structure and emphasises her delicacy.

• if the model is overweight, she should be wrapped in a thick, heavy mantle so thatthe texture and folds of the garment can be fully explored in the painting. This willalso distract the viewer from her rotund form.

• if the model has knowledge of such artistic trickery, flatter her, e.g. a classic line is“Paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along your throat.”

• her face must be painted in the favoured style – mix rosa with a white tint for the• cheeks, this will give the ideal cherubic flush. Her skin must be pure white, with

rosybuds. Do not be exact, ignore those scars and bruises.

See how the husband paces like a dark shadow, behind her.

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• use white tint for the pupils to brighten saddened eyes and make innocent those eyesthat are shadowed with guilty sin. Make her eyes sparkle more than those diamondsupon her bosom, for that will indicate her inner spiritual richness.

Vacant, portholes of an abandoned ship are her eyes. They are swimming with tears andold ghosts.

• her cleavage must impart femininity, it must invite the viewer yet remain dignifiedand unobtainable.

Her breasts sag empty, they must be empty of milk for her newborn whom the nanny tends.

• shape the contours to make her curvier than she appears. Omit all extra chins.• use cross-hatching to give texture to the mantle. The lines intersect each other from

left and right so the onlooker can almost feel the material.• the blackness of her cloak symbolises her purity, her simpleness of nature, herstaid-

ness.

She looks so solemn for one so young. The Duke spits curses at the wailing babe. Herforehead corrugates painfully, rippling her bruised brow.

• black is the mark of a virtuous woman

yet the white ruffles at her neck barely conceal those passionate purple blotches

• use a dab of water when painting silken ruffles, to give them some sheen

“Cherry blossom,” he calls her wickedly, injuring the smiles she sends to my Master and I.

• the white ruffles now look pearly against the black mantle

White versus black . . . good against evil. Five guineas her husband selected her heavy garb.

• allow the colours to bleed towards the edges of the canvas. Leaving cameo whitespace around her form would make her look like a dream, not a reality.

A bough of cherries as a token of love to her, from a lowly soul. That is the stuff of herdreaming.

• don’t forget those blooming rosebuds and glowing skin, on her hands where themantle laps, as well as her face. She must radiate good health.

The poor girl grows weary, her skin shiny and grey like wet clay while the baby whines.

• her form must glow with the warmth of her surrounding environment.

He barks at his wife to silence the babe. “Smother it!” he bellows, “With your motherlyaffections, my dear.”

What acid drops from his mouth to sear his own wife and child!

• to blend the colours well, swish the brush left and right, swish swish

And oh, how the baby whines!

NB Portraiture, the art which captures beauty “like caging a butterfly”

n.b. Pandolf = the art of distortion


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School of Communication, Informationand New MediaUniversity of South AustraliaSt Bernards Road, SA 5072 MagillAustraliaE-mail: [email protected].

bridging the creative and the critical

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