Uncreative Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Roach
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Creative Expression ◽  
First Century ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter demonstrates that, thanks to the heavy reliance of publishers’ marketing departments on author interviews as a means of promotion, today interviews are increasingly conceived through their opposition to creative writing. Drawing on the examples of Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and J. M. Coetzee, the chapter demonstrates that interviews have become the quintessential example of uncreative, instrumental, authorial labour. However, in a time in which literature is frequently conceived in opposition to information, interviews also become a productive site for authors to reflect on the nature of literary representation and contemporary creative work. In their opposition to creative writing, interviews can also become an example of ‘uncreative writing’. As information surplus and networked digital computing make traditional, primarily print-based, norms of authorship, creativity, and inscription less tenable, for some of the authors discussed here the interview offers a generative site for exploring new modes of creative expression fit for the twenty-first century.

Miranda July and the New Twenty-first-century Indie

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen A. McHugh
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
First Century ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Independent Cinema ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Film And Video

This chapter singles out the brilliant, idiosyncratic multi-mediary work of Miranda July as exemplary of American independent cinema as it currently stands. Defining the latter in terms of the emerging indie culture of the twenty-first century’s second decade, McHugh argues that July’s oeuvre reframes the masculinist rhetoric that has dominated the discussion until now. Manifesting itself communally, through informal networks rather than through self-stylisation, July’s creative work is collaborative, improvisational, and distributed across a broad range of platforms including, besides film and video, writing, acting, performance and conceptual art, all of which are represented in her two feature films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011).

scholarly journals Dialogue of Cultures in the Creative Work by Czeslaw Milosz

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-344
Author(s):  
Mikalai Khmialnitski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz ◽  
Political Events

The aticle deals with the peculiarity of the literary representation of multiculturalism and the borderland in creative work by Czesław Miłosz. The factors which influenced the development of Milosz’s poetry are revealed, the life of the author in Wilno in the inter-war period is considered, and the romantic tradition of Adam Mizkiewicz is outlined. The cultural and political events which were reflected in the legacy of Miłosz are examined; the period of emigration and the homecoming are studied. The cultural and national specificity of the borderland, which affected the creative writing of Miłosz, is depicted, and distinct ethnic and cultural models, images and symbols in the author’s ideological and artistic inquiries are analyzed. 

Wingwomen

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-208
Author(s):  
Anna Ball
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
First Century ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Selection Of

The motif of flight is prominent in Palestinian creative work, yet in its contemporary connotations, it assumes increasingly multiple dimensions as it migrates creatively across generational, gendered, spatial, and formal contexts. In the work of artist Sama Alshaibi and poet Lisa Suheir Majaj, aerial and avian images reappear and the motif of flight animates each woman’s ability to explore her complex relationship not simply to the homeland and Palestinian history, but also to her own embodied positionality as a twenty-first century diasporic female subject. In exploring a selection of Alshaibi and Majaj’s poetic engagements, this chapter gestures towards flight not simply as motif but also as sociocultural movement (simultaneously spatial, gestural, and political) within the post-millennial Palestinian creative imagination. This is a movement defined by a distinctively feminocentric poetics, through which it becomes possible to envisage new forms of spatial, psychological, and creative relationships to Palestine fitting for this new century.

What Satire Does: Lessons from the English Renaissance for the Great Age of American Satire

Genre ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-227
Author(s):  
Eric D. Vivier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Creative Expression ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Mass Shootings ◽  
Rhetorical Genre ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Way

This essay argues that satire should be defined as a rhetorical genre rather than a literary genre or mode. It begins by analyzing a little-known meta satirical poem from the English Renaissance—John Weever's The Whipping of the Satyre (1601)—in order to highlight the range of potential rhetorical consequences of satire, which include not only blame for the target but also blame for the satirist, polarization of the audience, and more satire in the way of imitation and response. It then shows that these potential rhetorical consequences are consistent across time by analyzing The Onion's coverage of mass shootings in the twenty-first-century United States. This comparison between English Renaissance satire and modern American satire suggests that satire is consistent in rhetorical rather than formal terms, and therefore that satire is less a type of art than a type of social action. Satire is a way of using creative expression to make someone or something look bad.

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