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Preface On Creativity and Academic Writing For twenty-five years I've taught more creative writing classes than any other sort—I've been asked to teach more creative writing classes than any other sort. Creative writing is also the class that has given me the most pause. When I arrive at a new university, some form of the following conversation almost always occurs: Them: "Oh, you will teach a creative writing class, won't you?" Me: "I'd rather not." Them: "But you seem so eminently qualified to teach creative writing. You've written so many novels and short stories." Me: "Novels,yes. Stories, no. But I really don't know if I have anything to teach in terms of creative writing." Them: "Oh, but I'm sure you do . . ." I'm being somewhat disingenuous. As I said, creative writing is the class I have taught the most, and I suspect it will be the class I shall go on teaching the most. (I am scheduled to teach one such workshop this coming summer.) Certainly it's an easy class to fill with pleasant comments , pleasing pastimes, and passably interesting exercises. The problem is, however, philosophical—specifically, ontological. I'm just not sure if "creativity"—as it is presupposed, as it is hypostatized, as it is cornmodified and reified in endless writing workshops and the brochures they send out to attract writing students—exists. And I feel the same discomfort teaching a class in "creative" writing as I would were I a physicist assigned to teach a class in "phlogiston" physics—assigned to teach it not as a historical reaction of a vanished and discredited theory, but as a modern enterprise all my eager students believed wasthe latest scientific dope on the realest of real worlds. In his various notes on nineteenth-century Paris, Baudelaire, and the Arcades, Walter Benjamin makes a most intricately suggestive observa- viii Preface tion: When, in the ninteenth-century marketplace, industrial products passed a certain number, it became a practical impossibility to know all the relevant facts about each product's manufacture, the quality of the materials that went into it, the care and craft with which it had been made, and thus its durability and functionality.To compensate for this general loss of empirical knowledge, the more generalized notion of "good taste" arose to occupy the interstices, override the positivities, and finally sublate the material interplay of the known and the unknown— all that was left of the empirical knowledge about care, quality, manufacture , and efficiency that had gone by the name of quality. It is, then, in the same sense that I might saythat good taste has no ontological status that I suggest a similar denial of ontological status to creativity. That is, while it is a social reality, it is reducible—like a chemical compound—to its constitutiveelements. But, unlike a compound, its fundamental properties are also reducible (as in a chemical mixture) to the properties of its constitutive elements. Having located this so important relationship between empirical knowledge and good taste, we can fix a number of other concepts that bear the same necessarily mystified relation one to the other. Most important for us today is, I suspect, the relation between individual strength and institutional power; for I would maintain that it is interesting, even necessary if we wish to be effective political citizens, to consider that strength bears the relationship to power that empirical knowledge bears to good taste. Use value and exchange value are another, more classical pair that bear a like relation (and the complexities of their mutual and forever interdependent analyses suggest just how complex this relationship —however simple it may look at first—actually is). The relationship of technology to science is one more such relationship.And the relationship of craft to art is still another and—in this discussion — the one that most concerns us. What is problematic about these relationships is that in the second, reified , mystified term from all these pairs—from good taste to exchange value to power to science to art—lies all possibilityfor both guided and unguided growth, for unconscious response, for both evolutionary and entropic change. That such change and growth have been present in the human universe since caves and chipped flints is the reason that the earlier , positive, and seemingly pure terms—knowledge, strength, usevalue, craft, technology—are never really pure. The mystified nimbus always inheres in them, glimmers like an aura about them, flickers as...

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