Welcome to Creative Critical
The twenty-first century has seen the erosion of any sharp distinction between the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’. Can criticism itself aspire to be creative? Does creative writing have a critical force? Or should we dispense with these terms altogether?
Such questions come to the fore as creative writing embeds itself in the academy, demanding fresh thought about the forms and languages of criticism, and new kinds of literature more attentive to their own critical force. This website aims to be a forum for all such forms of writing, thinking, and teaching.
Welcome to Creative Critical
The twenty-first century has seen the erosion of any sharp distinction between the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’. Can criticism itself aspire to be creative? Does creative writing have a critical force? Or should we dispense with these terms altogether?
Such questions come to the fore as creative writing embeds itself in the academy, demanding fresh thought about the forms and languages of criticism, and new kinds of literature more attentive to their own critical force. This website aims to be a forum for all such forms of writing, thinking, and teaching.
Poetry and Indiscipline
By Sam Buchan-Watts and Lucy Mercer. On 10 May 2024 we held a closed, eight-person symposium in a seminar room at MayDay Rooms entitled ‘Poetry and Indiscipline’. An ‘archive, resource space and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal...
Found Poem
By Tim MacGabhann. 'Found Poem' is a text that tries to blur the borders between autofiction, the critical essay, and poetry. By examining misquotation and redrafting in detail — with successive drafts of ‘the same poem’ presented as a demonstration of these practices — the text opens itself outwards towards the argument that forgetting and remembering are not opposites, but aesthetic strategies that aid and abet one another.
You Can’t Say That: The Serious Limits of Literary Studies Creativity
By Tim Lanzensdörfer
A formative moment in my literary studies education, such as it is: a German class in high school, just before graduation, and we’re reading and discussing Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker. We’re on the appendix, where Dürrenmatt outlines a theory for the play, which may be a theory of drama as a whole.