| This dissertation is a series of essays that investigate how undergraduate creative writing pedagogy might be revitalized and re-situated in current English Studies and Liberal Arts curricula. Each chapter addresses how creative writing might function within the four curricular elements presented in Robert Scholes' The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline: production, consumption, theory, and history. Two of the central problems my dissertation addresses are problems of production and desire. While traditional creative writing pedagogy often situates itself outside of the professional and analytic functions of English departments. The dissertation uses critical and materialist theory to argue that professional, analytic, and creative skills should come together in the spirit of what Herbert Marcuse calls “sensuous rationality.” Production and desire, work and play, should come together so that creative desire is produced and creative production is desired. The dissertation argues that contemporary creative writing students are best guided by a critical understanding of the ideologies that encourage them to write, by collaboration with other writers, and with a willingness to articulate ideological change in both their liberal arts programs and in the world in which they live. Thus they can assess their own desires, and the forms they take in their writing, and produce work that can critically and creatively engage larger cultural desires and forms. |
