Dear Students of Amy: Creative Writing, Writing Studies and the Department of Anguish - with Mumblings Here and There on the Post-Theory Lyric

摘要

Poetry is a discourse committed to the display and exploitation of contradiction. Criticism, by contrast, is an informational discourse. How do we keep criticism from murdering its subject with its pretensions to truth? (Jerome McGann) Dear Students of Amy, When Professor Taggart (Amy) recently asked me to speak about creative writing to your Introduction to Writing Studies class, I was of course glad to accept. Because I'm only one of two creative writing teachers in my department, I sometimes find myself in the role of apologist or not very confident authority, especially when defining or trying to justify creative writing to students, administrators and my more scholarly colleagues. But I admit I enjoy the challenge, and am even a little obsessed with the question of how creative writing is, or should be, understood within the whole spectrum of writing types and English Studies as a whole.