1. Welcome to everyone. I am Gabriel Flynn and I’m Thomas Karshan, and we’re the founding editors of the new website creativecritical.net for which this is the launch event. We’re delighted to see so many people here and to welcome the various members of the editorial board. The aim of the website, and of the launch event today, is to develop the various discussions that are already taking place about the relationship between the creative and the critical – in universities and schools more broadly, in literature and the arts.
2. We start from the recognition that the creative and the critical are shape-shifting terms with long, complex histories and a still more complex relation, which we mark with the ugly hyphenated term creative-critical. There are a lot of different conversations, and forms of writing, teaching, and art-making currently going on which do or might consider themselves to have something to do with that relation. Such conversations include the fundamental question of what the creative and critical are, or whether we should hold on to those terms at all; how or if to bring together the two sides of literature departments that emerged from the late 20th century, through bridging the teaching of creative writing and of criticism; how to move beyond the essay as the dominant mode of literary response and assessment; and how to evaluate poems, novels, plays, and other forms of ‘creative’ non-fiction under the rubric of so-called research. These also include such recent developments such as the resurgence of interest in the non-methodical essay, the popularity of the Sebaldian non-fiction novel and of creative approaches to non-fiction and hybrid forms of writing more broadly: lyric essays, verse novels, experimental translations; as well as the long traditions of Ekphrastic, philosophical, and theoretical writing with and about art; and of poetics, writing with and about poetry which one of our contributors has called ‘the writings that writers write about writing’.
3. We are following in the wake of pioneering work by, among others, Tim Mathews, who set up the creative-critical PhD at UCL; and by important anthologies by Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley, The Creative Critic, and Stephen Benson and Clare Connors, Creative Criticism. The purpose of this website is to bring all those conversations and forms of teaching and writing into one place so that they can become visible to one another and enter into dialogue. We aim for the website to be a neutral forum, not advocating for one mode or genre or position over any other. We think that, as the arts more and more enter universities, this question of the relation of the creative to the critical is going to be central to the future of the humanities and may equally change the nature of literature itself.
We’ve spent the last year or so putting together initial materials on the website. We hope now that this launch will inspire lots of new submissions and proposals – and also suggestions for material to be re-published either by permission or out of copyright. [Show website on screen.] You will see that there are tabs for writing, teaching, method, and events. Evidently there will be plenty of cross-over between these tabs.
By writing we have in mind work – and it can have visual, filmic, and musical elements – which is presented so as to draw out the relation between the creative and the critical. We intend to publish in this tab three different kinds of writing, broadly speaking – 1) fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, translation, art, and film which framed in such a way as to make it clear how it addresses this question ; 2) which does the same; and 3) writing and art which is directly positioned as creative-critical.
4. One of our ambitions for the website is also to make a place where people can write, talk, think about, and publicise modes of teaching which draw on both creative and critical practice, and breach the wall between those two sides of literature departments. We have already published quite a lot here. We encourage people to share syllabi and accounts of their teaching practice, examples of work that students have produced, and thinking about the relation between literature and teaching. We’re also publishing examples of creative-critical teaching in schools and extramural universities, which are often ahead of universities in this. Look out for the materials from John Hollander’s famous course at Yale on Daily Themes, and material from Barbara Bleiman at the English and Media Centre on creative and critical teaching at A-Level.
The third tab is called ‘method’, though we nearly called it theory. Here we hope, as the name suggests, to publish theory and history about the relation between the creative and critical relation, in any guise. All the talks from today will be going up there, and we warmly encourage others who attended today and who would like to write something on the relation between the creative and the critical to submit to us. Look out for the annotated bibliography on creative writing as research which we will soon be publishing there, too.
There is also a fourth tab for recording events such as this one, today. It in fact follows on from a sequence of such events, which have been organised in collaboration with the Institute of English Studies at IAS – a summit on the creative-critical, jointly organised with the Institute of English Studies, that took place at Dragon Hall in Norwich in 2019, a day on creative-critical teaching which took place at IES earlier in 2019, and a launch for the Beyond Criticism book series which took place in IES at 2018. My colleagues Stephen Benson and Clare Connors, who were sadly unable to make it today, have organised a series of such events at UEA.
Within each area of the website there are clusters and it will be possible for people to curate and edit bodies of material (for example, Robert Hampson’s blog on Poetics) and we welcome suggestions for projects within the website.
We also have a link to the Beyond Criticism book series, edited by Simon Palfrey and Katie Craik at Oxford, with which we have a supportive relationship.
5. A word on our artwork: It’s from Jerome’s Study, a collaboration between the artist Catrin Morgan and the writer Max Porter, published by Prototype in 2018. The image you see is one of number of what Morgan calls isomorphic translations of paintings depicting Saint Jerome in his study and we thought they were perfect because of the way they draw on various, interacting forms of scholarly work both ancient and modern, critical and creative.
To submit material or propose for the website, you can email the editors at editors@creativecritical [dot] net, or speak to or email any member of the editorial board – which gives us a chance to welcome them now – Robert Hampson at Royal Holloway; Mathelinda Nabugodi at Cambridge; Gregory Leadbetter at Brimingham City; Redell Olsen at Royal Holloway; Emily Orley at Guildhall; Katja Hilevaara at Goldsmiths; Sam Buchan-Watts at Newcastle; and Tim Beasley-Murray here at UCL. Foour members of our editorial board can’t be here today: Stephen Benson, Clare Connors from UEA, Bethan Stevens from Sussex, and Maria Fusco from Dundee.
We’re also on Twitter at CCdot_net so please look for us there and feel free to share your impressions of today’s event.
6. The format for today will be a panel of three speakers from 10:15 – 11:35, a break for coffee, and then a second panel from 12 – 1. We will have a break for lunch from 1 – 2:15 and then a third panel from 2:15 – 3:35, before a second coffee break and then a final panel from 4:05 – 5:15, before we wrap things up by 5:30.
As you will see, we have not organised speakers in terms of their field or areas of specialisation – just the opposite. We are hoping to create conversations across conversations. We invite you to participate as fully as you can. There will be an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of each panel and the coffee and lunch breaks are intended to facilitate that. Please do join us, if you can, for a drink afterwards, from 5:30 to 7, upstairs in the Marquis Corwallis pub, which a seven minute walk from here, on the corner of Marchmont Street and Coram Street, just by the Brunswick Centre.