The rise of creative writing and the new value of creativity

Abstract

This dissertation examines the academic field of creative writing and its social position since its emergence just before World War II. Analyzing why this field has grown so robustly, I challenge the common perception that it is a subsidized refuge for literary artists, arguing that its expansion corresponds to a rise in the socioeconomic value of creativity. While the reading and study of literature has been losing cultural capital, literary production in the academy has boomed because globalization has transformed the U.S. into a post-industrial economy in which workers increasingly produce concepts, emotions, and lifestyles, rather than material goods. The skills learned in creative writing courses--what I call "creative literacy"-- can be used to make literary works, but they are also increasingly a means of producing content for a wide range of social forms, from advertisements to social networking websites. Creative literacy is therefore a primary tool for the formation of subjectivity in our contemporary moment.

After considering the larger social and institutional contexts of creative writing, this dissertation makes further interventions in the areas of pedagogy and poetics. I argue that during the postwar period, oppositional struggles for cultural capital have largely determined how creative writing is taught and how literary works are read. Creative writing's pedagogy has been dominated by "the workshop method," a group evaluation of student work that emerged from New Criticism's approach to literature as a self-contained object to be judged for aesthetic merit. This oppositional pedagogy reproduces a more general tendency in the twentieth century to frame poetics as a conflict between the traditional and the avant-garde. I consider alternative modes of teaching creative writing and reading literary works, and in both cases I emphasize the need for writers and readers to examine their positions in a social and historical context, and to engage in an ongoing practice that does not claim ownership of a particular aesthetic identity.