Towards a New Poetics in Creative Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

We exist today in what has been called a post-Theory academy. This means that the conditions for intellectual work in the contemporary humanities are constituted by two interrelated elements: a desire to move beyond the methodological restrictions of Theory and engage more practically with thepublic sphere; and the need to adapt to the institutional pressures of anincreasingly corporatised university. The discipline of Creative Writing is well placed to contribute to this intellectual work, having emerged in Australian universities alongside the New Humanities as part of a challenge to traditional forms of literary education. The challenge for writing programmes is how to accommodate the insights of critical theory, identity politics and cultural studies, and the critiques of literature which these offer, while still retaining the central pedagogical aim of Creative Writing, which is to teach students how to develop their writing skills in order to produce literary works.