A live event, a life event: The workshop that works

Cowan, Andrew (2012) A live event, a life event: The workshop that works. TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 16 (1). ISSN 1327-9556

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

In certain recent critiques, the term ‘workshop’ has been used to describe almost every aspect of our discipline’s pedagogy. The various models might be arranged along a horizontal axis that has as one pole the wholly taught, exercise-based class for beginners and at the other the wholly discursive workshop for advanced students, with a vertical axis that begins with recreational or high-school classes and ascends through the BA to the MA and MFA, and then on to the elite MA and MFA programmes exemplified by the likes of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Alternative axes might calibrate the extent to which a programme is publication- or research-oriented, or to which the pedagogy is premised on a formalist or a ‘sociological’ poetics. This paper attempts a defence of the peer-review workshop by first distinguishing it from other forms of Creative Writing pedagogy, and concludes by offering an understanding of the workshop as an advanced and necessarily formalist pedagogy whose encounter with the work-in-progress requires an openness to its ‘singularity’ and a resistance both to instrumental readings and to prescriptive instruction.

Item Type: Article
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)

Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Creative Writing Research Group
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Creative-Critical Research Group
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Katherine Humphries
Date Deposited: 12 Dec 2012 09:03
Last Modified: 11 Jul 2021 23:52
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/40530
DOI:

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item