The extent to which a newly emergent discourse of ‘Creativity’ is serving to focus and drive debates at the intersection of literary, linguistic and cultural studies was made powerfully apparent at a recent symposium held at Nottingham University. Organized by Peter Stockwell, Professor of Literary Linguistics, and Mark Robson, Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Literary Theory, the event was co–sponsored by the Poetics and Linguistics Association and Praxis, the Centre for the Study of Literary Discourse at Nottingham University. The occasion marked the publication of Stockwell and Robson’s anthology, Language in Theory, a timely work bringing together an important collection of texts exploring the interdependence of literary and linguistic theory. It was during their collaboration on this volume that they realized the intriguing connections across recent books by Derek Attridge, Ron Carter and Rob Pope (1), and decided to make something more of their launch party than the usual wine, canapés and academic small–talk. The three authors accepted invitations to speak, and the result, ‘Creativity: A One Day Symposium’, provided the capacity audience, a diverse collection of discourse analysts, stylisticians, legal and health professionals, educationalists, literary and cultural critics, and linguisticians, with a valuable opportunity to participate in a productive and provocative debate.
The variety of questions and challenges which were articulated during the day suggest that the ramifications of ‘Creativity’ provide a welcome escape from the intellectual, disciplinary and institutional limits which would usually prevent such a group even from gathering, much less collaborating. However, with discussion ranging from practical questions about how to integrate creativity into conventional pedagogy, and then necessarily how to assess it (in a class or and RAE panel), to complex theoretical and philosophical conundra concerned with definition and precision, or/and with the contradictions of creativity’s rich semantic heritage, the symposium was in some ways as exasperating as it was exciting as participants occasionally struggled to sustain several very different strands of argument at the same time. It is clear that the topic will bear much further scrutiny, and one imagines it will be central to the discursive agenda in the Humanities for some time to come.
The event opened with presentations from each speaker, outlining core ideas from their books and situating these ideas in relation to each other’s work. Attridge refined his account of creativity in order to give particular emphasis to his argument emphasising the singularity of the ‘act/event’ of creation. For him, creativity (or what he calls ‘inventiveness’) takes place for both author and reader in their shared experience of a literary text, and is defined by a distinctive, unique and yet crucially iterative quality. Indeed, it is in part the potential for repetition of the act-event of reading which constitutes its singular quality, as the tensions within existing cultural conventions become apparent not only to the author in the act of creative writing, but also to the reader in creative interpretation. This repeated confrontation with the ‘other’ embodied by the text endows creativity with a necessary moral element, obliging author and reader to recognise and evaluate their relation to the ‘other’ of the text. Although Attridge acknowledged that inventiveness/creativity takes place in the full range of human experience, he was thus primarily concerned to define and defend the specific value of the literary text, more properly the unique creative experience, or process, of writing and reading a literary text, and in so doing, he returned fruitfully once more to the notion of literariness itself.
In contrast, Ron Carter argued forcefully against such exclusive delimitation of the realm of creative activity, making the case for new forms and methodologies to assess the range of new materials, new evidences, made available through advances in recording technology and computational linguistics – specifically corpus linguistics, which permits access to substantial, searchable digital archives of recorded speech. Carter drew on examples from the CANCODE corpus to demonstrate the extraordinary creativity inherent in ordinary talk. In doing so, he rejects the conventional critical priority given to the literary artefact and to written language (with purported grammatical norms), over the ephemera of everyday conversation. He argues that these new materials and methods begin to open up analysis of the variability and mobility inherent in the spoken idiom. They thereby require not only that we reassess the grounds of our understanding of orality, but also of the criteria by which we define creativity. These are traditionally drawn from the study of poetic or written forms (and invested with evaluative force, most problematically from association with post-Romantic ideologies of authorship and originality), which may ultimately be exposed as inadequate given the range of invention and innovation revealed through the corpora of spoken discourse.
Rob Pope offered a further, overarching perspective, situating our contemporary notions of creativity (and arguments), in the wider pattern of historical and cultural variation, teasing out the contradictions suggested by the term’s shifting semantic field. Pope’s stress lay on the unpredictability of creative process, and also – echoing Carter – on its collaborative and evolving nature: creativity is never ex nihilo. It was, more than anything, the form of Pope’s intervention which was most startling. Using an overhead projector to combine in a visual field otherwise unrelated texts and objects, he challenged the audience to play with their sense of meaning and form, examining how a further text emerges through intervention and collaboration. He also circulated various objects –a flower, a rock and a nest –asking how these constituted forms of ‘natural’ creativity distinct from human creativity. More generally, Pope typically challenged the conventions of keynote presentations with a provocative, interactive, unsettling performance which enacted his demand that we all embrace a revised relation to creativity.
In the open debate which flowed from these initial interventions, a number of predominant themes emerged. First, it was clear that there is much support for the ‘democratic’ impulse of Carter and Pope’s work, which attends to the ordinary and everyday, extending the long, polemical tradition of Raymond Williams’s seminal essay of the 950s, ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (Williams is a recurrent figure in Pope’s work). However, there was also concern that there is a risk of evacuating necessary distinctions between great literature and linguistic playfulness – between, for example, Hamlet and a conversation in the pub – though Pope and Carter were evidently far more sanguine about the dangers of such relativism than Attridge, or at least they were more ambivalent in their reactions. Second, the ethical aspect of Attridge’s defence of the literary act–event opened up more broadly the question of the moral freight of the term, whether it should be taken as a morally neutral category. Is there such a thing as a creative crime? Or to offer a more recent and controversial example, is 9/ a creative act?
Third, a more nuanced account of the opposition between spoken and written forms, which had perhaps been mapped too easily onto an oral/literary binary, was necessary to accommodate, for instance, theatre and other performance art forms. Fourth, as Carter made clear, much more needs to be done in terms of refining, even inventing, methodologies with which to address the corpora – it is an open question whether literary studies might properly engage with the opportunities this provides to reimagine the discipline. Fifth, there was intriguing discussion of practical and pragmatic issues, which included the question of how Pope’s radical pedagogy, or commitment to the playful and collaborative versions of collective creativity, dovetails with institutional assessment imperatives. This bordered onto larger questions about the implications of work in this area, in terms of its relation to the professional and disciplinary constraints of contemporary HE.
The questions which seem ultimately to haunt this emergent, interdisciplinary discourse of creativity seem to me concerned above all with value. Creativity and creative are terms which involve both description and evaluation, and provoke serious questions about the value, context and direction of our work – questions which these books and this symposium have brought to the fore. Pope and Carter share a polemical, democratic interest in demonstrating the creative qualities inherent in the most common and ordinary areas of life. They are fighting a necessary battle against the ‘mass civilization/minority culture’ dichotomy, with its tendency to compound educational and aesthetic hierarchies with class privilege and presumption (or consumption). Likewise, they reject institutional and academic inertia, that conservatism of subject boundaries and disciplinary hermeneutics which prevents the articulation of new questions, the emergence of new forms of knowledge. The field of ‘creative writing’, the work of ‘creative–critical intervention’, the attention Carter proposes to ‘The Art of Common Talk’ (with the potential for a revival of studies of rhetoric and oratory through the lens of modern stylistics), and Attridge’s insistence on the significance of the act–event of literature offer important challenges to conventional literary criticism, to the separation (or at best uneasy bed–sharing) of literary and linguistic studies, and by extension to the instrumentalist and managerialist logic of the twenty–first century university machine.
Notes
1. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004); Ronald Carter, Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk (Routledge, 2004); Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History and Practice (Routledge, 2005).
