Anxiety city, forever: Post-war fragmentary fictions and theorizing a potential creative writing studies.

摘要

This dissertation examines introductory creative writing classrooms and codified notions of authorship and invention. Readings of four experimental postwar American novels---Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, Carole Maso's The Art Lover, Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and David Markson's This Is Not a Novel---culminate to argue that these texts' fragmentary structures---in addition to their subversions of codified writing lore---illustrate a creative and theoretical approach to interrogating how students come to think about labels like "author" and "process." Surveys of new media theory, copyright law, literary theory, rhetoric, histories of literacy and the book, and creativity studies combine to help theorize a multidisciplinary creative writing pedagogy that emphasizes the habits of mind that all students---not just creative writers---will need upon graduating.;Part I begins with a history of "The Author" as a cultural icon resulting in a collective anxiety of authorship for many creative writers. I argue Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father and Carole Maso's The Art Lover interrogate this author figure through their non-traditional and fragmentary approaches to fiction. Part II focuses on "The Process" specifically Invention. Much like the narrative of the author, the inherited narrative of the process is linear, mystified, and places a premium on originality. I advocate for familiarizing students with the sociocultural theory of creativity, which maintains that imitation, borrowing, and collaboration are essential to most models of creative processes. This half examines Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and David Markson's This Is Not a Novel arguing both resubmit an invention technique that fell out favor during the Renaissance---the commonplace book---to aid in the development of the complicated awareness of craft, context, and audience that the creative writer must hone. This study concludes with an epilogue that envisions a revamped Introduction to Creative Writing Studies course that furnishes students with a survey of the discipline. This multigenre, concept-based, multi-modal introduction to Creative Writing Studies seeks to address the schism between critical and creative writing, and how the habits of mind we value in creative writing can be applied across disciplines.