Introduction, by Joe Moshenska and Iris Pearson

In their much-quoted manifesto for description as an illuminating literary-critical mode, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love and Stephen Best list possibilities for descriptive critical forms:

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Honouring what one describes can involve reenactment, translation, memorising, and copying. […] Such acts of mimetic description are unlikely to generate institutionally familiar genres of scholarship, but they can be creative, illuminating practices that produce forms, data, and insights keyed to the liveliness of worlds and works.[1]

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Worrying at the edges of critical decorum, these theorists articulate a desire both to interrogate and to reinvent critical writing. Their project seeks surprising, clarifying, alienating forms which achieve a renewed engagement with the textual object, ‘keyed’ to the activity and intricacy of that text. It is that fidelity to ‘liveliness’ which characterises the mood of the essay, as its three authors insist upon the insufficiency of analysis, the excavation of meaning, for articulating textual richness.  If this account exemplifies the tendency of recent debates surrounding method in literary studies to lead towards a blurring or hybridising of the creative and the critical, it also captures the terminological challenges that such debates face.  The more rich and expansive this trio of critics seek to make description, the less clear it becomes just what the term ‘description’ itself describes, if it can encompass practices as varied as ‘reenactment, translation, memorising, and copying.’

A pursuit of liveliness, a concern with plural forms of practice, and an openness to the institutionally unfamiliar are often identified with the sphere of the creative-critical.  They have been central to ‘Creating Criticism’, the project launched by Joe Moshenska and assisted by Iris Pearson at the University of Oxford since January 2023. ‘Creating Criticism’ dedicates itself to exploring, highlighting, and cultivating writing which blurs and reconfigures the boundaries between the creative and the critical; the project depends on its gerund as a sign of the ongoing, constantly evolving, in-process nature of such work. Where is the line, we ask, between creative writing and literary criticism? Is there a line? Who polices the line? What different kinds of knowledge can each of the modes, with their attendant techniques, tones, and structures, bring to light? How might the conventions of criticism be reworked to include creative methods which might reroute or intensify its critical priorities?

If such writing is manifested in a varied, even unwieldly, range of forms – whether experimenting (for example) with fragmentation, voice, self-editing, collaboration, or digital media –  it is unified by the vivid consciousness of the activity of criticism that it both embodies and seeks to provoke. The creative-critical work which preoccupies the project attends to the actualities and possibilities of writing, to its practice and processes, to its modes of knowing, its purposes, and its audiences. Its disparate manifestations share a commitment, too, to conceiving critical writing as open, but not reducible, to the stylings of the personal: the critical practices that they imagine and enact remain responsive to, and shaped by, the particular textual object with which they engages, concerned with aptness and with fit.

This writing often leapfrogs institutional categories, posing both excitements and challenges for departments and publications organised according to the kind of disciplinary lines whose history John Guillory lays out in his book Professing Criticism.[2] The purpose of such leapfrogging is not, however, merely to regret and to ignore these disciplinary and institutional structures, but to ask what can be learned about both their limitations and their affordances from the kinds of manoeuvre required to elude or reshape them.  ‘Creating Criticism’ therefore offers a space which acknowledges and engages with the formal categories and structures of literary studies rather than seeking to dismiss or transcend them: leaning on critical or creative affiliations as a starting-point for a discussion of the different or similar knowing and writing that conventionally emerges from each strand of scholarship. It proposes this hybridised, boundary-crossing writing as a partial and incremental response to the seemingly perennial “crisis” of literary studies, in tune with a recognition – shared, and increasingly urgent – that scholars of literature need to evolve and experiment if our discipline is to thrive and survive. It contends that collaboration and co-understanding are the routes to reviving the reputation and the activity of literary criticism, and that the intersection of the creative and the critical provides a compelling and promising place for this collaboration.

‘Creating Criticism’ does not, however, seek to prescribe specific novel ways of writing, nor proscribe existing ones; it does not consign critical conventions to a scrap-heap of tired, passé scholarship. It strives to uproot, problematise, catalyse, wonder, and recreate, certainly, but also to exhibit and to map the kinds of writing which are already taking place at this juncture between the creative and the critical. ‘Creating Criticism’ has sought to provide practical opportunities for contemporary experiments and experimenters attentive to the possibilities for critical writing, gathering a field which has so far remained largely piecemeal and inchoate, scattered in corners of departments or in the gaps between professional and personal pursuits.  One of the principal strategies of this project has been to treat the institutional formats within which critical practice tends to unfold – the seminar, the lecture, the conference – as themselves opportunities for generative experimentation; intellectual gatherings of this kind are part of the repertoire of forms that the creative-critical might seek to engage with and rethink.  In June 2024, we organised a colloquium in Oxford intended to further experimentation of this kind.  We invited a group of speakers who practise writing in ways that fall within the sphere of the creative-critical as we have come to understand it, but whose disciplinary formation and institutional context is quite different: academics at various career stages who teach in literature departments and in art schools, and independent scholars.

For this conference, we shifted our focus from the ways in which different kinds of writerly practice bear on the category of the creative-critical to the affordances, possibilities and limitations of the category itself.  It had become increasingly clear in the course of our project that applying the label ‘creative critical’ to writing of the kind that concerns us is inescapably a complicated endeavour, since one of the few things that the very different writers engaged in this kind of practice tend to have in common is a deep discomfort with the labels that get attached to their work; such labels often seek to re-categorise the deliberately uncategorisable.  And yet, for a whole host of practical reasons – not least the ways in which their work is mediated by academic departments, bookshops, and other institutions – writers cannot afford to be uninterested in the work that such descriptors perform.

With our colloquium we set out to ask: are the categories under which such writing tends to be organised only and inevitably experienced by writers as an imposition?  If work of this kind aims in part to treat the practical circumstances of writing as conditions for its endless reinvention, then might these organisational categories also provide opportunities for writerly practice?  In order to pursue these questions, we asked our speakers to give presentations that engaged directly with, reflected upon, responded to or took their bearings from one or more of the following four possible descriptors for their work:

• Creative Criticism
• Experimental Criticism
• Creative Non-Fiction
• Literary Non-Fiction

We asked them to present a piece of work produced specifically with one or more of these designations in mind; some writing shaped by the way it might aspire to embody, rethink, or explode one or more of these categories.

The pieces contained in this field report do not exactly reproduce the remarks that were delivered at the colloquium.  Rather, we asked some of the speakers to develop their remarks while considering and reflecting upon the transition from a spoken to a written version.  Questions of voice and of occasionality emerged as matters of recurrent concern at the colloquium, and given our emphasis on the ways in which the framing of a piece of writing should reflect its institutional setting, it seemed necessary to foreground the necessarily transformative transition from the spoken to the written that occurs when producing a durable record of the colloquium, rather than occluding it.  Indeed, we hope that the question of how to produce an aptly creative-critical written record of a creative-critical gathering is prominent among the various questions that this cluster of pieces provokes.

The colloquium began with a plenary address by Mary Cappello, whose remarkable and varied body of work has been a lodestar and an inspiration for ‘Creating Criticism’ since its inception.  Cappello’s short book Lecture is exemplary of our central concerns in the way that she combines critical reflection on the history and nature of the lecture form – what it might be, what it tends to become – while creating in the process a new version of the very form that she seeks to understand, and the kinds of thinking it can embody and provoke.  Here we reproduce a version of Mary’s plenary lecture, framed by some additional reflections on the nature of the plenary or keynote as a curious subgenre of the lecture form.  This pair of texts form a bridge between Cappello’s wider body of work and the specificity of the remarks delivered at the colloquium, both an autonomous occasion and an integral part of a wider authorial whole.

The other pieces included here bear a variety of resemblances to the papers that were delivered at the colloquium itself, and reflect to varyingly explicitly degrees on what is at stake when making the transition from spoken to written.  Writers of all kinds make this shift routinely, while rarely having the chance to reflect upon it; but creative-critical writing is so often distinguished by the specificity of its attention to the quality of voice that it seeks to embody (or experiments with embodying), and so the question of moving from oral delivery to the written or typed word has a particular pertinence.  In fact, the question of voice emerges as one of the recurrent threads that ties these pieces together in the midst of their rich variety; which version of oneself and one’s voice is and isn’t made manifest in different versions of creative and critical writing, and how this making manifest is inflected by the categories and contexts within which one is working, and, above all, by the object of creative-critical scrutiny.  The contributions include elements of continuous analytical prose, poetry, songs lyrics, visual images, fragmentation and collage, autobiographical glimpse and excursus.  There are frequent family resemblances and moments of resonance among the group, even as to read them as a whole is to be confronted with the sheer diversity of work that can take place under the auspices of the categories of writing that were our gathering concern.

In addition to these variously reworked and reframed pieces we have included abstracts of the other papers that were not included here – another genre of written record that gives an alternative sense of the occasion as a whole.  We also asked those in attendance to submit short reflections on the colloquium in general or on specific presentations, and include a selection of these here which feature their own dazzling forms of difference, even as the echoes among them reaffirm the existence of the recurrent concerns that lie at the heart of our project, and of creative criticism more broadly.  The core question of the creative-critical as we understand it – the question that we strive to keep open as the one that needs to be asked anew every time we write – is: what might I make in response to another’s act of making?  The papers collected here, and the first iteration of responses that they provoked, map a richly suggestive and necessarily non-exhaustive set of responses to this question.

Thanks to the John Fell Fund for their support of the various endeavours of ‘Creating Criticism’, and to Martha Swift and Ronnie Pope for their practical assistance with the June 2024 conference.

[1] Sharon Marcus, Heather Love and Stephen Best, ‘Building a Better Description’, Representations, 135 (2016), pp. 1-21 (14).
[2] John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).