The rise of digital publishing and the ebook has opened up an array of possibilities for the writer working with innovation in mind. Creative Writing and the Radical uses an examination of how experimental writers in the past have explored the possibilities of multimodal writing to theorise the nature of writing fiction in the future. It is clear that experimental writers rehearsed for technological advances long before they were invented. Through an in-depth study of writers and their motivations, challenges and solutions, the author explores the shifts creative writing teachers and students will need to make in order to adapt to a new era of fiction writing and reading.
The rise of digital publishing and the ebook has opened up an array of possibilities for the writer working with innovation in mind. Creative Writing and the Radical uses an examination of how experimental writers in the past have explored the possibilities of multimodal writing to theorise the nature of writing fiction in the future. It is clear that experimental writers rehearsed for technological advances long before they were invented. Through an in-depth study of writers and their motivations, challenges and solutions, the author explores the shifts creative writing teachers and students will need to make in order to adapt to a new era of fiction writing and reading.
Creative Writing and the Radical: Teaching and Learning the Fiction of the Future
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Creative Writing and the Radical: Teaching and Learning the Fiction of the Future
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Overview
The rise of digital publishing and the ebook has opened up an array of possibilities for the writer working with innovation in mind. Creative Writing and the Radical uses an examination of how experimental writers in the past have explored the possibilities of multimodal writing to theorise the nature of writing fiction in the future. It is clear that experimental writers rehearsed for technological advances long before they were invented. Through an in-depth study of writers and their motivations, challenges and solutions, the author explores the shifts creative writing teachers and students will need to make in order to adapt to a new era of fiction writing and reading.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783095940 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 07/18/2016 |
| Series: | New Writing Viewpoints , #13 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 243 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Nigel Krauth is Professor of Creative Writing at Griffith University in Australia. He has published four novels, and co-authored a number of books for Young Adults. He is General Editor of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.
Nigel Krauth is Professor of Creative Writing at Griffith University in Australia. He has published four novels and co-authored a number of books for young adults. He is General Editor of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.
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Creative Writing and the Radical
Teaching and Learning the Fiction of the Future
By Nigel Krauth
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2016 Nigel KrauthAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-594-0
CHAPTER 1
The Concept of the Radical in Writing
Radical Practice in the 20th Century
The word radical has a radical history. Rooted in the Latin word radix, meaning 'root', in medieval English it was applied to plants and, by implication, to the 'root' qualities of a person or thing – the fundamentals, the essence. When attached to actions in the 18th century, it came to mean thorough: thus a radical reform meant a change which gets to the root of a problem. While the sciences continued to use the word in its medieval sense (even today a radical number is the root number as in a square root, and a radical in chemistry is the fundamental element taking part in a reaction, e.g. an atom), politics in the 19th century changed its meaning to the very opposite of its medieval meaning. Radical change stood for extreme and revolutionary change, and radical was applied to progressive and unorthodox ideas which departed from traditional roots.
This ironic history where a word comes to mean its opposite is useful for the purpose of talking about writing because writing itself has come through fundamental transformations. In medieval times, the power of writing was significantly controlled by hierarchies of religion and governance – it was the tool and weapon of the status quo. (On the other hand, the oral was the medium of the masses.) With mass literacy and mass print production, writing's power dispersed: it moved into the multiple hands of the governed where it worked as retort, not as edict. The radical in writing developed as an escape from notions of one-ness – of tradition, convention, formula, the predicted way of doing – to embrace new possibilities.
The logic of the medieval conception of radix, the root, was focused on the idea of a tap root, a single generative source for a plant; this corresponded with notions of authority and hierarchy at the time. Following Deleuze and Guattari who put rhizomic root systems on the agendas of cultural and literary studies, today a point of origin and growth is more likely identified as an interconnected array, as a multiplicity or matrix, rather than as a singular source. Our current conception of roots, as in the rhizomic patterning of grass roots, sees them as lines of growth outwards into new places and territories still linked to origins. We see them as the investigators, the adventurers, the researchers, those that take nourishing new ground. So, the word radical is still about roots even 600 years after it was first used, but these are different roots. They are exploratory; they are not rooted to the one spot.
The word radical has been applied to the arts and design for almost a century (the OED notes the use of radical in describing the design of a car in 1921), but radical has not been well-defined in this context. It describes works which, in artistic terms, stand apart from the mainstream, use structures that are unconventional and have agendas that are rebellious. It applies to artworks which in political terms are left-leaning and in moral terms seem outrageous because they break rules. At the basis of any use of the term radical in the arts, there is a sense that tradition has been violated, beliefs have been challenged and the comfortable has been upset. The term works as a sort of bogeyman – an indistinctly outlined threat to our supposedly solid understanding of what the arts (and our lives) should be. It is a term that indicates outcasts. It names the sin bin occupants of the arts game.
My concept of the Radical relates to process: I define it as a constellation of particular strategies that produce ground-breaking artistic outcomes. It subtends from political and cultural activism and changing aesthetic and social enthusiasms, and in the arts it expresses itself in processes that reflect new understandings and ambitions, especially those of individuals caught up in bigger social, moral and political change. Perhaps surprisingly, the nature of these radical processes has remained somewhat constant, suggesting that there are conventions associated with the unconventional – that the modes for rebellion have remained somewhat always the same!
Radical practice has been subsumed under other names, especially the avant-garde. The usefulness of that term – avant-garde – is intersected by the birth, uncertain life, and death of several movements in the 20th century – Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Oulipo-ism, Fluxism, and more – all doing radical things and having different radical agendas across artforms. Just what these movements achieved, and how they all fit under the umbrella term avant-garde, has been a contentious topic (see, for example, Brill, 2010; Bürger, 1984; Cottington, 2013; Foster, 1996; Kostelanetz, 1982; Krauss, 1986; Murphy, 1999; Poggioli, 1962; Sullivan, 2012). Especially sensitive for debate is the fact that a key feature of these movements involved practitioners bringing separate artforms and practices together – which has never fitted with the academic or critical departmentalization of Writing, Visual Arts, Music and Performance. Very few university departments, academic or popular journals, publishers, newspaper review pages or sections of shelves in bookshops actually devote themselves to covering all of these arts areas at once – or even combinations of them – as opposed to categorizing and dealing with them separately. Even websites in the hypermedia age persist mainly with focus on segregated artforms. The culture itself, driven by economic and academic factors, has keenly outlawed practitioners' desires to bring artform practices together.
In spite of the regular use of the term radical to describe a wide variety of movements, practitioners and practices since the early 20th century, no single concept for the Radical in the arts has emerged. In this book I use the term Radical to describe a very particular aspect of the concept of the avant-garde and the movements and practices grouped under it. For me, the Radical is the view of the project of revolution in the creative arts since the early 20th century as seen from the inside. In other words, the Radical is the view that the practitioners themselves took. It involves what they wanted to do, the reasons why they did it and the strategies they pursued. It has been a surprisingly consistent set of aspirations for over a century, yet it has been systemically suppressed from the outside and sometimes erased. These ambitions have had nothing to do necessarily with what critics thought or reported was happening, or how academics interpreted practitioner activities. While culture is shaped significantly by what arts practitioners produce, a major part of that shaping is mediated by 'the interpreters' of product. The point of view and interests of the reader/audience/purchaser have driven critical debate, while practitioner processes themselves have been regularly ignored or disparaged.
In this book I focus strongly on the viewpoint of writers themselves, on ways in which they spoke about and theorized their own practices (also often ignored or disputed or disparaged by reviewers, the public and academic critical theory) and ways in which their experiments were almost prescient about what would transpire in the 21st century. If, following Valéry, I am so bold as to claim that the Radical in creative writing was a 20th-century project seemingly aimed at precisely what we have now – the marvellous benefits of hypermedia – I do so as an extension of the perception Walter Benjamin made:
The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, a new art form. (Benjamin, 1968: 237)
As an example, Benjamin evoked the 'extravagances and crudities' of Dada and said of that movement: 'It is only now [i.e. 1936] that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film'. Then he added (and this I challenge) that Dada 'was not conscious of such intentions as here described' (Benjamin, 1968: 237).
I cannot see why Dadaists should not have been conscious of significant aspects of what they were doing. Cinema existed in burgeoning form during the Dada period (1916–1924) and D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), for example, appeared right at the start of Dada and was highly influential. Intolerance is considered a masterpiece not least for its 'shocking' collaged/intercut editing together of four disparate narrative storylines. The 'cut-up' was, of course, one of Dada's favourite methods. As a critic, Benjamin is obliged to insist that Dadaists could not see into the future, but his history-based theorist's view does not get inside the motivations and perceptions of the artists and writers who looked at the world around them and sensed possibilities and trends. In my view, in this instance and in many others, the Radical was a space for writers/artists to test out what they perceived or hoped was inevitable from their observations of the world, and a key theme was the entry of multimodality into the reading process.
While the Radical established itself strongly in the early 20th century with the emergence of Dada and Surrealism, its roots went deeper into the past. In fiction writing, for example, Laurence Sterne produced inspiringly radical work in the mid-18th century, his experimental attitude based in the complex storytelling of Cervantes and Rabelais. Before Sterne, Aphra Behn, George Herbert, Geoffrey Chaucer and others used structural and typographical processes still seen as radical today. If one needs a short cut to understanding the nature of the Radical in literature, one might think first about concepts related to the singular, the linear, the beginning-middle-and-end structure, and then think how a writer can replace them with multiplicity, collage or a rhizome of fragments. This idea applies to the mapping of the practitioner's role in the culture or community as much as to the structure of the work of art s/he produces. Breaking free of the linear and the monomodal is the central issue of the Radical – and from it other radical considerations subtend.
My use of the term Radical still draws on many of the values encapsulated in the past in the terms radical literature and radical writing. These terms have been used to refer not to experimental fiction or poetry but to writing that stemmed from left-wing ideology associated with politics and revolution in the 20th century. It must be acknowledged that the idea of revolution was always in the minds of Radical fiction writers. In the view of the society they wrote into, their daringly disruptive interference with the status quo of Literature was threatening. Fiction where text was strewn across the pages, or the pages could be strewn across the room, was discomforting. Explosive attacks on the certainties of the linear were (and still are in some quarters) a bibliophilic treason, a literary terrorism. Marginalized writers have regularly committed to changing the status quo of capital 'L' Literature to bring about a revolution in reading and publishing.
But in the 20th century the Radical pursuit seemed to chase a revolution that was promised over and over, but never happened. For example, William H. Gass's apparently ground-breaking text +photography novel of 1968, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, used radical concepts similar to André Breton's text +photography novel of 1928, Nadja, which itself followed Georges Rodenbach's text+ photography novel Bruges-la-Morte of 1892 – an 'experiment' ongoing for 75 years. Gass also used text + image layout techniques remarkably similar to Paul Éluard and Man Ray's 1935 photography+ poetry book, Facile. Raymond Federman's concrete prose novel Double or Nothing (1972) was admired for spreading text across the page in a manner similar to that pioneered by Guillaume Apollinaire in his Calligrammes (1918) some 60 years earlier. The radical processes the Beats pursued after WWII – for example William Burroughs' cut-up techniques in Naked Lunch (1959) – were the same radical processes the Dadaists introduced after WWI with Tristan Tzara's instructions for how to write a Dadaist poem. And Italo Calvino was still firing the same fusillade at conventional Literature in 1979, 20 years after Burroughs, with the collaged novel If on A Winter's Night A Traveller. It wasn't until the 1990s that the shape and promise of the next regime came into view. When technology provided writers with hypertext, it was realized how many radical experiments of the 20th century had been precursors to the computer age. Twenty years further on, with the advent of hypermedia, the revolution in writing was recognizably actually occurring.
Radical Fiction in the 18th and 19th Centuries: Early Experiments
The debate about which was the first novel written in English? focuses on a dozen contenders, including Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur in the 15th century, Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia in the 16th century, and in the 17th century, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. The debate continues today because critics have different criteria for defining the novel. These criteria are, of course, imposed with hindsight gained from forms the novel took in later centuries. From today's writerly (as opposed to readerly/critical) viewpoint, however, we understand that the earliest novelists were investigating a prose form about which they knew very little. They were writing blind. Their daring experimental forays into long prose fiction were driven by Radical motivations. They entered new literary territory to try out new voices and structures because they were intrigued by the possibilities of this new form and dissatisfied with the dominant modes of fashionable and conventional writing around them. In other words, the earliest novelists were impelled by thinking very similar to that of experimental writers in modern and postmodern times.
The earliest novelists did not know whether or not the novel was going to work as a form, nor what forms it would ultimately take. Like 20th-century writers seeking to escape the restriction and stasis of the page, the earliest novelists sought escape from the dominance of theatre and epic poetry. They wanted to create whole worlds on the page rather than on the stage, and they wanted to use the language people spoke, the honesty of prose not the artifice of verse. But their revolutionary writerly ideas faced significant readerly opposition: in particular there was 'the natural antipathy of the natural man to listen to any continuous story except in verse' (Ker, 2010).
The dismal multitude of versified encyclopedias, the rhyming text-books of science, history and morality, are there to witness of the reluctance with which prose was accepted to do the ordinary prose drudgery. (Ker, 2010)
It is hard for us to imagine the 18th-century world where so much was written in verse and the novel was indeed (as its name confirmed) something so new. In England, no developed tradition of novel making existed, and while overseas models were exciting (e.g. the work of Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century and Frenchman François Rabelais in the 16th century) there were few examples to work with. (For a survey of imaginative prose written before the 18th century, see Steven Moore's (2010, 2013) The Novel: An Alternative History.) The idea of creative prose simply wasn't part of the culture; even the short story was mysterious. Great fiction was transmitted in verse or drama. Full stop. While the established major forms for literary writing in the 18th century were the epic poem (e.g. Milton's Paradise Lost) and the verse drama (e.g. Shakespeare), prose was the expected medium for religious teaching, education, official correspondence, history, philosophy, travel accounts and low-class popular storytelling. The novel as a serious sustained literary work was a radical departure from what fiction comprised. Those who wrote the first novels in English were radical ipso facto.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Creative Writing and the Radical by Nigel Krauth. Copyright © 2016 Nigel Krauth. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Concept of the Radical in Writing
2. The Radical in the 20th Century
3. Radical Experiments 1: Words
4. Radical Experiments 2: The Page, the Book
5. Radical Experiments 3: Narrative, Visuals, Sound
6. Experiments in Writing for Children
7. Fiction and the Future
8. Teaching and Learning the New Creative Writing
References