Theorizing Writing: Pros and Cons

Theorizing Writing: Pros and Cons Brian Evenson America! Review Creative Writing: Theory beyond Practice Edited by Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady Post Pressed http://www.postpressed.com.au 268 pages; paper, $44.50 AUD Creative Writing: Theory beyond Practice gathers twenty scholarly essays exploring meoretical possibilities for creative writing—a discipline that has been increasingly popular within the academy but which has remained largely untiieorized. Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady attempt here to start the process of taking creative writing seriously as a discipline, and have gathered essays from a number of predominantly Australian writers (who are also teachers) as they try to sort through questions such as "How does creative writing fit into the academy?," "How can theoretical approaches translate into classroom practice?," "How are changes in technology changing the way in which we think about writing?," "How does theory reposition the way we think about race, class and gender in regard to our own and our students writing?," and many questions in between. The essays themselves range from the highly rigorous to the anecdotal. There are a few very strong essays here. Among them is Kevin Brophy's '"Peculiarities and Monstrosities': Consciousness, Neuro-Science and Poetry," which uses current trends in dunking about the nature of consciousness to reconsider not only the way in which poetry is put together but to rethink die nature of selfhood. It ends up, after a careful elucidation ofcognitive ideas, posing questions meant to be provocations for the classroom and the teaching of poetry, and it raises many more questions than it resolves. Lance Olsen's more strictly praxis-oriented "Against Accessibility: Renewing the Difficult Imagination" makes a compelling pitch against "the model of the workshop as a pedagogical arena whose objective is to promote mere competence." Olsen instead argues for difficult texts, suggesting that teachers supplement examples from traditional writers with an "anti-tradition," and that they employ textbooks with unorthodox approaches. Olsen additionally elucidates possible exercises that might provoke students into new and original spaces. Paul Dawson's "Writers, Critics, and Literary Authority" takes on the relation of writers to criticism, suggesting the way in which this relationship has shifted over time and thinking carefully about the writer's role in the academy. Anna Gibbs's "Writing and Danger: The Intercorporeality of Affect " similarly has a great deal to recommend it: it speaks of the way that writing activates affects in the reader and takes on the ethical difficulties surrounding the traumatic narrative. Other essays have much to recommend them, but leave the reader wanting more. Donna Lee Brien's "The Power of Truth: Literary Scandals and Creative Nonfiction" examines the complexities of nonfiction's truth value: most ofthe essay is interesting and provocative, but her ultimate conclusion that nonfiction draws its power "from the nonfiction trums it tells" is less than theoretically sophisticated. Thorn Swiss and Maria Damon's "New Media Literature" is a interesting descriptive essay that unfortunately trails off long before making a leap to theorizing or exploring practical possibilities. Since the collection makes an effort to be widely inclusive, including essays on fiction and poetry, on the academy, on digital media, on non-fiction, and on specific teaching experiences (for instance, Inez Baranay's account of a three week creative writing workshop she taught in India), there is likely to be a little to interest everyone. This is, of course, both a strength and a weakness: saying there's a little to interest everyone is tantamount to saying that there's a great deal that anyone will want to skip over. Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice strikes me as a slightlyflawed but necessary book. Indeed, Creative Writing: Theory beyond Practice would have greatly benefited if the editors had shaped the collection a little more, exchanging a broad inclusiveness for essays that resonated with one another slightly more. That's the case with some of the essays—with theoretical ideas from one essay resonating with praxis in another—but too often an essay seems to be working against the general feel or thrust of the book. That's especially evident in McKenzie Wark's "How (Not) to Become a Public Intellectual," which feels very occasional and is a...