Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
Textual culture: a postmodern approach to creative writing pedagogy
Writing creative writing pedagogy
JENNIFER DUNCAN
Atextual culture approach to creative writing pedagogy is an idea, based on the visual culture approach to art education, for how to reinvigorate not only the study of creative writing but also the field of English. It aims at giving post-secondary education the tools to better address challenges brought by the conditions of postmodernity while benefiting from postmodern values on heterogeneity, plurality, and inclusivity to give both students and faculty more critically rigorous authority and playfully creative engagement with textual practices.
The story of this idea begins not in the academy but in the Yukon, where, while writing my second book, I collaborated with artist David Curtis in developing a visual art foundation year program in Dawson City, now known as the Yukon School of Visual Arts.* As I had studied Aboriginal Pedagogy at OISE/University of Toronto and had already designed a community-based writing program for Dawson, I knew that the art school would need to be inclusive of the local culture and peoples, build on local skills and traditional knowledge, and be developed in consultation with the local First Nations government and the larger community. It was immediately apparent that a traditional discipline-based model that hierarchizes fine art over design and craft and that focuses on the main subjects of drawing, painting, sculpture, art history, and design principles would be completely inappropriate. Also obvious was the fact that, without any entrenched institution in place, we had a free hand — a rare and exhilarating opportunity to create something entirely new, something as wild and rigorous and intense as the Yukon itself.
I was aware of the recent paradigmatic shift in art theory from looking at art as the products of the art world to seeing art as the practices and products of a visual culture. I began to delve more deeply into what this could mean for art education. Paul Duncum’s “Visual Culture: Developments, Definitions and Directions for Art Education” provides a definition of visual culture useful for educators, in which visual artifacts “are viewed in their contextual richness, as part of an ongoing social discourse that involves their influence in social life” (107), but concludes that this will only widen the field of study without changing the practices of the art teacher. Without focusing on the term “visual culture,” Arthur D. Efland, Kerry Freedman, and Patricia Stuhr’s Postmodern Art Education: An Approach to Curriculum compares modernist to postmodernist values, theoretical premises, educational modes, and art practices, and develops a vision for the use of postmodern concepts in instruction. In this vision, pedagogy would resist meta-narratives by including mini-narratives of those excluded from the canon, explicate relations of power in the constitution of art knowledge, employ deconstruction to avoid privileging singular viewpoints, and explore artworks as “multiply coded within several symbol systems” (72). Synthesizing these and further works of theorists such as Paul Duncum, Chris Jenks, Kerry Freedman, and Theresa Marché,** I came up with the following picture, included in the program design I wrote with artist David Curtis in 2006:
The visual culture approach sees art as a form of meaningful cultural production that is a carrier of conventions reflecting the society in which it was created. Visual culture includes all aspects of fine art, craft, and design within a diversity of cultures. An integrated approach makes connections and provides continuity between art making, art history, art theory, and art criticism; between a multiplicity of cultures and historical periods; and between a variety of materials, techniques, and modes of expression. An integrated visual culture approach thus creates authentic opportunities for students to connect theory to practice and recognize the connection between art, their lives, and their communities. (1)
The design we came up with breaks down boundaries between the school, the community, and the environment; between fine art, design, and craft; and between art history, theory, and practice. Local artists, elders, and experts are invited in to share knowledge. Studies are organized by thematic units to allow greater integration of all disciplines and subjects. Our themes were chosen to support certain foundational skills, such as drawing a still-life; include First Nations values and practices; and introduce key issues in cultural theory. These themes were Harvest, Objects, Animals, the Body, Clothing, Masks, Carnival, Ritual, Memory, Shelter/Home, and Landscape/Mapping/Boundaries. Every lesson begins with the students’ own knowledge, generates critical questions, and incorporates history, aesthetics, and theory with practice so that students are always questioning the cultural contexts of art and the production of meaning as they hone their skills and produce their own art.
In our original design,*** and in order to support the seasonal cycles of the local and traditional culture, the school year begins with a Harvest unit in which students go into the bush and the local dump to gather materials for making their own art supplies and assemblages. The middle of the year is marked by the students putting on a winter carnival for the town, while investigating Bahktin’s theory of the carnivalesque and carnival practices in a variety of different cultures. The year ends with students exploring Landscape/Mapping/Boundaries and collaborating on group earthworks or community-intervention projects, directly involving the community and environment. The plurality and indeterminacy of this design de-centres dominant Western ideologies and allows for greater inclusion of marginalized values, peoples, histories, pedagogies, and art practices, as well as creating greater critical rigour and creative free play. Now that the school has been running a few years, we can see the results of this approach. Administrators have reported that every single one of the first graduating students was accepted into a top Canadian program down south. Their first-year portfolios include work of fourth-year sophistication, and the administrators of established art schools had only one concern about accepting these students, which is that they will be bored in the traditional programs.
It made me wonder if a similar approach could be developed to benefit creative writing and English students. What if we changed our concept of our subject from English to textual culture, and from “creative writing” to “creative textual practices”? On what theoretical basis might this be done? How would we define a textual culture approach? How would this be different from the mixed workshop already in use? How might this enliven and extend curriculum and program designs both inside and outside the academy? And how can we ensure that the teaching of literary practices and products, already endangered by the overwhelming proliferation of popular culture, is supported rather than superseded by a textual culture approach? How can we ensure that creative writing is not subsumed as only one of a variety of ways to enter the great literary and greater textual conversation that overwhelms us in the Information Age?
The work of Roman Jakobson, Paul Armstrong, Robert Scholes, and Gerald Graff can be used to propose a theory of heterogeneous textual practice and develop a practical pedagogical model of textual culture studies. In “The Future of Theory in the Teaching of Literature” and Professing Literature, Gerald Graff argues that the English department is a theory, and an incoherent theory due to the field-coverage principle (which business calls silo engineering) isolating individual courses to submerge conflicts between them. With reference to James Kincaid, Graff proposes that we need a new model that centres not on the texts themselves but on how we situate ourselves in relation to these texts — in other words, a model that centres on textual culture. Scholes’s argument in Textual Power that English studies are organized by the three binary oppositions between literature/non-literature, production/consumption, and real world/academy, in which consumption is privileged over production (and creative writing is at the bottom of the hierarchy as the production of pseudo-literature), is a call to deconstruct these boundaries. Furthermore, Armstrong’s definition of literature as “an inherently multifarious entity which conflicting communities define in sometimes irreconcilable ways because of their different presuppositions, interests and purposes” (124) and his identification of the central paradox of conflict and validity in literary studies “that critics can have legitimate disagreements about what a text means but they are also able to say with justification that some readings are wrong, not simply different” (2) can be the premise for a postmodern definition of literature as textual culture and a practice of multiplicity in ways of engaging with texts. Thus, an English department that was a heterogeneous, rather than incoherent, theory would focus on how we situate ourselves in relation to literature, would see literature as subject to conflicting definitions, would make conflicts explicit and subject these to tests of validity but see them ultimately as an irreconcilable plurality of beliefs, and would then be engaging in a textual culture approach.
The textual culture approach begins, then, with the premise that reading and writing text are practices that are productive of particular and diverse ways of experiencing, thinking about and constructing our lives, communities, and cultures, including both visual (literate) and oral (linguistic) cultures. Textual culture includes literature, composition, creative writing, and professional writing, as well as forms of art, performance, and technology that involve text. A textual culture approach is integrative and makes explicit the connections between cultural knowledge, critical analysis, and creative practices to produce authentic and meaningful learning experiences that allow students to situate themselves in relation to texts, contextualize texts in relation to their worlds, and critically and creatively enter the ongoing, generative textual conversation and consciousness.
In practice, this approach would begin with establishing a learning community to collaboratively design an integrated curriculum, instead of following the “field coverage principle” in which instructors operate as silos, independently covering a certain field such as Romantic poetry or post-structuralist feminist theory. Rather than mounting individual courses, the following converging streams would be offered: Textual Practices/Creative Processes, Cultural/Historical Understanding, Critical Inquiry, Aesthetic Issues, and Discourse Analysis, and these could move through a series of theme-based units.
Let’s say the theme is the Journey. In Textual Practices/Creative Processes class, students would be working on a short story involving a trip. In the Cultural/Historical Understanding class, students might be reading the Oedipal myth, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Victorian women’s travel diaries, Huckleberry Finn, On the Road, and Anne Carson’s “Kinds of Water.” In Critical Inquiry class, students could be exposed to Baudelaire’s and Wittgenstein’s concepts of the flaneur and Janet Wolff’s figure of the flaneuse, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces the post-colonialist theories of Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and more, to generate their own questions about translation, diaspora, urbanization, the frontier, and so on. In Aesthetic Issues, students would be exploring narrative, the characteristics and questions involved in different kinds of short story narrative structures. In Discourse Analysis, students would be comparing contemporary travel blogs and tourist guidebooks with literary travel memoirs, poems describing places, road trip films, and songs about journeys. The classes would all be in conversation with one another so that Huckleberry Finn can be questioned in post-colonial terms as well as explored structurally as a linear narrative. This entire methodology, then, is a real-world experience of how (many) writers write: by exploring the formal, theoretical, and literary dimensions of their subjects to inform their own creative process.
Now, many of the mixed workshops in creative writing basically achieve this same kind of integration, but this leaves much less time for students to write and critique. As well, we can no longer count on creative writing students having a strong background in the literature of the past or current cultural theories, or being able to make connections between the disparate English classes they take. A textual culture approach would directly address these problems and would produce a more enriched and generative structure and pedagogy to transform both creative writing and English studies into a postmodern form of education that allows for a more comprehensively critical and creative engagement, not just with textual culture but with the ways in which reading and writing shape consciousness.
There are still a few problems I’m working on with the idea of a textual culture approach to creative writing and English studies. The first problem centres on the difference between art in relation to visual culture versus literature in relation to textual culture. In the art world, it is no longer necessary to know how to draw to be an artist, as conceptual, performance, and installation art have freed art from paper and canvas. As well, there is much greater hybridity in the art world between art, design, and craft. This is not the situation in the world of letters. Writers still need to know grammar, and the literary world, despite the work of writers such as Rachel Zolf, Christian Bök, and Darren Wershler, is not deeply involved in a hybridity of forms that plays with academic, technological, and professional writing as a matter of course. As well, art education in the academy has always had practice (the creation of art) at the centre of study, whereas English studies have always had interpretation at the centre, with practice (creative writing, not composition) either absent or marginalized. These differences mean that a textual culture approach might not yet be appropriate unless it can be applied in a way that ensures a strong foundation in basic skills and a structure that upholds the importance of creative writing (as well as reading, composition, and professional writing skills), while stressing and problematizing the differences between literature (as art) and other textual practices and products that may not have art as an aim.
The second problem centres on the similarity between a visual culture and a textual culture approach: while rigorous, the plurality and indeterminacy of these approaches destabilizes specialization. Anyone who has spent the years of practice with technique that it takes to become accomplished at drawing a detailed sketch or writing a multi-layered poem knows that to become truly talented within a given art form means specializing to a certain extent. This is why I saw the visual culture approach as eminently suitable for foundation year or undergraduate studies, with the understanding that specialization would be the next step, when students would take courses specifically dedicated to particular practices.
The third problem is institutional. A textual culture approach is a radically different pedagogy and structure that requires instructors to work collaboratively and flexibly. While many Canadian art school administrators may deeply want to switch to a visual culture approach, it seems impossible, as this would dismantle all the current structures for job descriptions, enrolment systems, course selections, evaluation structures; the entire organism would need to change shape. In English departments, this would mean altering teaching positions and compensation to incorporate more team teaching and changing from a course selection structure to a fixed program of study to build a learning community.
However, I believe that these are ultimately resolvable problems and that the site for a shift to a textual culture approach to English studies as a whole would be in existing creative writing programs and writing centres. And I think the success of the Yukon School of Visual Arts students shows the benefits of such an approach: students who are critically aware and questioning, conversant with both traditions and experiments, experienced in a wide variety of skills, personally engaged with their studies, and committed to becoming meaningful creative forces. The art world exploded when the boundaries between art, craft, and design, and between theory and practice were challenged by feminists, post-structuralists, and post-colonialists, creating an entirely new visual culture. Imagine what playing with the boundaries between creative, academic, and professional writing, between theory and practice, and between institution and community could do for English studies and the literary world: no less than inventing new literatures and a newly relevant and reinvigorated academy.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Paul B. Conflicting Readings. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. Print.
Curtis, David, Jennifer Duncan, and KIAC Curriculum Development Advisory Group. “Foundation Year Visual Arts Program: Program Design.” Dawson City, YT: Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, with Yukon College and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government, 2006. Print.
Duncum, Paul. “Visual Culture: Developments, Definitions, and Directions for Art Education.” Studies in Art Education 42.2 (2001): 101—12. Print.
Efland, Arthur, Kerry Freedman, and Patricia Stuhr. Postmodern Art Education: An Approach to Curriculum. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 1996. Print.
Fehr, Dennis E., Kris Fehr, and Karen Keifer-Boyd, eds. Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You. New York: Falmer, 2000. Print.
Freedman, Kerry. “Social Perspectives on Art Education in the U.S.: Teaching Visual Culture in a Democracy.” Studies in Art Education 41.4 (2000): 314—29. Print.
Graff, Gerald. “The Future of Theory in the Teaching of Literature.” The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print.
. Professing Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Lodge. New York: Longman, 1988. Print.
Jenks, Chris, ed. Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Marché, Theresa. “Toward a Community Model of Art Education History.” Studies in Art Education 42.1 (2000): 51—66.
Scholes, Robert. Textual Power. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. Print.
Stankiewicz, Mary Ann. “Discipline and the Future of Art Education.” Studies in Art Education 41.4 (2000): 301—13.
Sullivan, Graeme. “Art-Based Art Education: Learning That Is Meaningful, Authentic, Critical and Pluralist.” Studies in Art Education 35.1 (1993): 5—21.
* The school was previously called the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture School of Visual Art (KIAC/SOVA).
** In fact, I spent over a year researching a visual studies approach to art education, far too extensive a study to summarize here. See the Works Cited for further foundational texts in the subject.
*** The curriculum has since been adapted and revised by the instructors teaching at the school.