Berlin, Creative Writing, and the Social Epistemic

I enjoyed thinking through the implications of Berlin's (comparatively brief) section on the postmodern creative writing classroom. Here, Berlin re-articulates his opposition to binary oppositions of poetic and rhetoric, particularly as he takes on Fenza's "curious inversion" in making "literary theory the counterpart of poetic in its preference for the subjective, intuitive, illogical, impressionistic, and stylistic," all of which, Berlin feels, would make theory and rhetoric "an ally of the poetic rather than an enemy" (174). I'm inclined to believe that poetic and rhetoric can be fused, even in the creative writing classroom, as students work on moving past the atomistic individual expression and toward a collectively revised piece of fiction or poetry. I'm probably most interested in the "negotiated" construction of identity in workshop environments--interested, that is, in this idea evolving as a discussion across a semester's workshop. Thus, of the three creative writing / rhet / theory critics Berlin invokes, I'm most in line with Tom Andrews (who wrote Writing After Theory (1992):

"To what extent are we "written" by language when we do our work? How is meaning constituted in our work? What social structures are we privileging, unwittingly or unintentionally?" (As cited in Berlin 177).

This seems like a social epistemic approach to what John Gardner offers as a personal attack on the "amateur writer" in his iconic Art of Fiction. Gardner famously suggests to students (and, ok, I'm paraphrasing to make a point, so I'm rhetorically aware of my own rhetoric here) that what is wrong with their fictions (p.o.v., emotional "frigidity," myopic characterization) is what is actually wrong with them as individuals. Andrews and others in the post-Berlin era--or at least those creative writing instructors who have read the growing body of rhet/comp scholarship in creative writing--are less interested in putting the romanticized lone individual poet in his or her place (i.e. "grow morally and your fiction will blossom!") and more interested in using the occasion of the writing workshop to better understand (without somehow "resolving" by a "final draft") the ways in which students writers have been written by a postmodern collage of "high" and "low" texts. In focusing on this, they hope to attune students to where other texts have given rise to the types of texts that they produce and consume (to invoke Scholes' phrase).

This approach to creative writing can be met with great interest (some come to workshop groaning over what they perceive to be the more touchy-feely rhetoric of the "poetic" expressivists they've encountered) and also with great resistance (it is never easy to suggest that someone's fiction, much less his or her identity, is socially constructed). However, among my traditional age students, those who've "come of age" in the last five-to-seven years writing blogs, fan fictions, themselves as MySpace entities, etc., there is nothing controversial about Schector's belief that "'the old "idea of the writer" [is] vanishing beneath the winking cursor of computer communication'" [Berlin's citation of Schector, 178]. Many of my non-traditional age creative writing students would likely take great exception to the notion that "the old language of the intuitive visionary--the 'true self," the "quiet moment," the universal discovery--is gone" (178).

For this latter group, I would probably be overly cautious about a social-epistemic pedagogy--or nudging class discussions toward related concepts--since returning to school and writing about (most often traumatic) life events as fiction (thinly veiled memoir) is often a long-delayed statement of individuality, empowerment, etc. And I see both sides, and seem to waffle between both sides due to empathy with both. It would seem that, like Gardner, Berlin, Schector, Andrews, and Forche have a more traditional age student population (and not a "blended population) in mind.

More on Hairston next time. . .