Composition: History & Theory: 1990 - 1999
Myers, D.G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (1996)
Description
The introduction to this work by D.G. Myers discusses American writers’ efforts to have academic careers and freedom via teaching creative writing and sets out to answer a number of questions about creative writers and the academy, including: What is the relationship between American writers and American institutions? What is the history of the creative writing course? What was the impetus behind the establishment of the course? Why has the creative writing course moved away from its foundations and become what it is today? & How has teaching arisen as a form of artistic patronage?
Myers argues that creative writing emerged as an attempt to unify two competing strands in English departments: teaching writing and teaching literature. However, he further argues that in this respect creative writing has failed and has created further division rather than unification. This tripartite divide is separated into “scholarship” (literature studies), “social practices” (composition studies), and “constructivism” (creative writing). Myers explains that he is presenting “merely a history” of creative writing. He asserts that the historical story of the rise of creative writing has not yet been written, so he is unable to create a “vertical system” as Foucault suggests because there is not material enough to create such a system. One fallacy that Myers combats in his text is that the historical precedent for creative writing is that it has been in this type of form (the workshop) since the founding of writers’s clubs (Smith qtd. in Myers 12). In reality, the discipline of creative writing does not spawn from writers’ clubs but from educational goals. Myers writes that “Creative writing was devised as an explicit solution to an explicit problem” (13). He claims that it “was an effort to integrate literary knowledge with literary practice” (13). “Creative” Myers explains is a term originally found in English in the 1670s. By the 1730s it was largely associated with literary criticism in phrases like “creative genius.” By the 20th century, we see creative applied to a wider array of activity, and it has become democratized, no longer reserved for genius.
Myers explains that creative writing courses were originally introduced as an “experiment” in education in 1880. This experiment intended for students to approach literature from a “creative” standpoint. This was part of the movement to study literature for its own sake and to integrate theory with practice. Teaching was the original goal of the course, not the production of texts. Before the development of the course, literature was treated as a means to some other end—now literature is treated as an end in itself. Creative Writing, Myers explains, was originally conceived as a means of studying literature from the inside (like learning a course in zoology taught by elephants). From its integrated beginnings, Literature departments have split into camps defined by James Berlin as “rhetoric” and “poetic.” There were three faculties of thought in literature: composition, the constructive art of literature, and scholarship. Myers pinpoints two kinds of literature in English departments: Literature 1 (includes the advanced study of writing) and Literature 2 (which produces one kind of literature and consumes another—i.e. scholarship or criticism). Creative writing is not rhetoric according to Myers: It is the concrete representation of the idea about the best way to teach literature.
The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (reviews)
The book is, as Roger Mitchell of Indian University puts it, “the first scholarly study of that most unscholarly subject.” Just about every review encountered calls this text a must read for teachers of creative writing; however, Mitchell’s thoughts, and those of Roman Jakobsen (“When Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobsen objected. “What’s next?” he said. “Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?”) seem to express a certain disdain for creative writing…
“The conclusion of The Elephants Teach sums up the current state of creative writing as it is taught in colleges and universities. Myers concludes that while creative writing originally sought to join literary criticism and literary production, during the seventies the opposite situation arose: the production of creative texts became separate from the discussion of such texts and the dichotomized roles influenced members of English departments to promote their own separate fields. Finally, Myers notes that the current state of creative writing that has emerged from teachers who want to write to writers who teach marks the end of an era.” (Laurie Champion, South Central Review)
“Although creative writing as a subject is more popular than it’s ever been (over 400 programs world-wide, granting 1,000 degrees every year), it’s hard to see such explosive growth and not feel a nervous twinge. What standard of writing are these programs directing their students towards? Are they all being taught, as some critics would charge, to “write like Iowa”? Further, what does it mean to have so many studying writing at a time when society marches toward even braver levels of illiteracy? In D.G. Myers’ The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880, the author reframes these anxieties by addressing a more basic question: How did writing become creative in the first place? Instead of detailing all the ways that creative writing is “broken,” Myers promises a broad historical perspective on how creative writing was conceived to “work.” Covering a century and a half of history, Myers’ at times fascinating account helps us understand the institutions, personalities, and philosophies that shaped the current state of American letters.” (Indiana Review)
Date of Upload
3/15/09