Addressing the ‘Ancient Quarrel’: Creative Writing as Research

from

Webb, Jen, and Donna Lee Brien. "Addressing the 'Ancient Quarrel': Creative Writing as Research." The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. New York: Routledge, 2010. 186-203. Print.

Summary:CW (though an ill fit) is usually collapsed into humanities because of shared medium of languageBecause this shared medium and the place of writing in traditional research is so visible, that it has rendered the importance/prevalence of CW research invisible.  Despite this there is a strong history of CW as a tool for knowledge.  “The Ancient Quarrel”, comes from Plato’s Republic “ancient quarrel of poetry and philosophy” (187).  Plato felt that it poetry was “unreliable” and based on “intuition” rather than actuality/reason. But Aristotle countered him like the boss he is: “an audience’s pleasure in mimesis is bound up with the opportunities it offers for learning” (qtd. 187).

1. ancient quarrel in the present context: research imperatives for writers in universitiesfor CW in universities the requirement of proving value is tied to  demands of gov and institutions for hard evidence/outputs.  Measurable results are directly tied to funding.cultural/symbolic/intellectual capital are resources that ‘define the chances of profit’ (qtd. 188).success of university and careers depends on capital and measurable outcomes. Many writer academics have begun to analyze how their practice can become research-based.Risky: the lure of skhole (leisure of time for knowledge) scholastic point-of-view.  Bourdieu worries that this contributes to conversion of practice from creation to scholarly dissection.Authors advocate for straddling line between aesthetic and academic purposes.
2. ancient quarrel: origins and genealogy

Plato is actually not completely rigid on his views about poetry/knowledge.  Though, he does emphasize the “enchantment” factory of poetry over reason.  He wrote about the pleasure of poetry and general contributions it could make to socieity.  Socrate’s Third Speech in the Phaedrus is a “higher mode of thinking informed by desire, effect on the poet of the divine, which generates a greater capacity to show and to know in the one so touched” (qtd. 180). Yet, poetry is still banished from the ideal city because “emotions and mimesis confound right thinking” (181).  “non-transparent” process in creative writing may confound its attempts to justify it as a vehicle of knowledge, as oppose to creative work.  Nicholas Zurbrugg may offer a way through the quarrel by calling on Barthes’ “prophetic technocreativity” = innovations emerge in artworks before philosophy.*Interestingly this is limiting a creative work to a single generative moment (director or auger, rather than container for knowledge)

3. Practice-led research and writing
specific issues associated with practice-research in writing are not found to the same extent in other creative fields. Because the medium is written language, creative writing does not readily permit the exploitation of performative or gestural research methods (193).  In fact, it is rather limited and must rely on methods of approach.  

take issue to:

“Conceptualizations of research that are based on non-linguistic ‘seeing’ and ‘perceiving’, for instance, do not fully take into account the actualities of practice for writers.” (193)

problem with legitimization probably stems from CW as “less easily reduced to an interpretive framework . . . less susceptible to rational argument than is conventionally accepted as a research methodology.” (193)

positivist methods hold on to Barthes’ notion of an author god.  

The end of 193 helps me validate the imposition of scientific terms and practices on “creative research”

“. . . feeling our way into a question or an idea that may lead to an original contribution to knowledge.  We know that we do not yet know; we know too that knowledge can never be full or final; and so we are perhaps more willing than other researchers to linger at the point of analysis, and to accept gestures and notions rather than facts” (193).

To resolve the quarrel outlined in the chapter the suggestion is to explore questions opened by exploring both  the process of making work and the content of the work.  

to do this it is necessary to consider trajectory of field, rules and surrounding context.  In short “training”

writing as research can’t ‘advance’ like science or offer hard proof/correctness but it can interrogate and offer new ways of seeing, provoking, and contributing to a field.

to start this path, writers must acknowledge themselves as researchers.  They must also consider epistemological issues/ethical questions.  Then they are ready to apply analysis and explore the theoretical and formal questions likely to contribute to knowledge.  

Writers may employ research techniques such as surveys, interviews, archival mining and participant observation.  Also think thorough data and analyze through lens of creative practice.  

writers must have “the capacity to understand the limits of what they observe, are told or found in the archives” (198).

When Writing is Research:

“works of the imagination are far less reliant than works of non-fiction, on conventional or factual investigation; however, in any mode or genre of creative writing, the research element must be experimentally developmental in its own terms; intentional, deliberate and systematic at heart; and committed to producing an outcome that is accessible both as knowledge and as artefact.”

perhaps CW’s greatest contribution has been in “defamiliarizing the familiar” (Morley qtd. 203).

Discussion Questions:

1. What are some examples that could constitute cw-based research.  What are some examples that don’t.  Where is the line drawn.

2. In survey/interview/journal based CW research, how far should we impose analytical and scientific terms on personal accounts?

3. What are the dangers of over-claiming research-based creative practice?

4. Are we forcing a more “scientific” scholarly perspective on our approaches in an effort to legitimize?  In this process are we self-sabotaging the hope of legitimacy? What about craft?

Can this be counter-productive or conflicting?  Are there two different things this chapter is advocating?

5. When can writing as research become dangerous or ethically blurry?  When is that line crossed?  What do these concerns mean in relation to “creative non-fiction”?

6. What does it mean to “tell the truth” in writing or/and “be accurate”