Tense affects between creative & critical

Posted on | February 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

I’ve just put in my abstract for the PhD conference here in Newcastle in April: ‘Creative Friction – How do the different modes of creative practice intersect with the world of traditional academia?’

The theme looks at how the two parts of a creative practice PhD – the critical and creative – interact, and what are the tensions and frictions between the two.

Tense Affects in the Practice of Writing

Does the delineated nature of the creative practice PhD encourage the doctoral candidate to develop separate affective strategies for managing the critical and creative parts of the project, and does this offer a useful friction or constraining tension in the completion of the work?

The Creative Writing PhD is not a study of the reception of a text; rather, the critical component is focused on the interrogation of how literary texts are produced within a creative process. In some institutions there remains a tension over the extent to which the creative component can itself be used as the text interrogated, with concerns of insularity and a failure of scholastic engagement beyond the production of an untested work.

A more interesting question behind this tension is that of the affective impact of needing to write across two forms: the creative, and the scholarly; and the affective strategies the PhD candidate must develop to manage that oscillation. These strategies may be essential in ensuring completion, particularly where the practitioner may feel the creative work itself is a contribution to original knowledge without the need for a critical component. This question is most pertinent for creative writers, where the movement is between two forms of writing.

Using my own creative and critical writing, and the journal I am using to map the coordinates of this question; and drawing on the creative considerations of writers-who-are-academics, and turning to the creative/critical texts of Nicholas Royle and Celine Cixous, I will highlight some responses offered to these issues, and bring to the fore some common strategies creative practice candidates can use to come to terms with the emotional content found in the relationship between the critical and creative requirements of the PhD.

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