Teaching Women's Writing: A Case Study in Creative Praxis

Creative writing assignments as textual interventions and "deformances" of original texts, and as alternatives to traditional composition assignments, can strengthen students' sense of unfamiliar and marginalized subject positions encountered in the literature classroom. Entering into a long-standing debate over the value of creative writing pedagogy in the literature classroom, this article takes an in-depth look at the trials and triumphs of a semester in the classroom teaching "The Woman Question in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction" through a creative praxis. It includes a detailed review of the creative assignment prompts alongside the students' submissions. Writing creatively encouraged students to develop an intersectional and inclusive view of women's writing. Finally, creative praxis, by encouraging students to pull apart a text and rebuild it themselves, offers alternative ways of producing the same desired outcomes of traditional literary analysis: critical and astute close readings, effective use of evidence, and thoughtful and persuasive arguments.