Utilizing Emotion Theory and Performance Studies In
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WRITING TO FEEL / FEELING TO WRITE: UTILIZING EMOTION THEORY AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGY A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By KEVIN HENDERSON Dr. Donna Strickland, Dissertation Supervisor December 2012 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled WRITING TO FEEL / FEELING TO WRITE: UTILIZING EMOTION THEORY AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGY Presented by Kevin Henderson A candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy And hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Donna Strickland Professor Martha Townsend Professor Samuel Cohen Professor Heather Carver This dissertation, like this degree and most things in my life, would not be possible without the bountiful love and support of my family. I want to dedicate this work to my wife and best friend, Annette, and to our inspiring children, Michael and Matthew. I also want to dedicate this work to my mother, who fostered my interest in writing at an early age, and to my father, who passed away during the drafting of this manuscript. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to all who helped me develop this project and pursue this line of academic research. The focus of this dissertation originated in a paper for Dr. Donna Strickland‘s seminar on theories of affect, emotion, and movement in rhetoric and literature. As my dissertation supervisor and mentor for this area of research, Dr. Strickland has been invaluable in her help and support. I also want to thank my other mentor and advisor, Dr. Martha Townsend, for her continued academic advice, good will, and suggestions for developing research in coordination with institutional review boards. Dr. Sam Cohen and Dr. Heather Carver have also been instrumental in the research and design of this manuscript and have also provided motivation at key intervals in the evolution of this project. I also want to thank my current and former colleagues in the Department of English at Drury University for their gracious time and assistance: Dr. Peter Meidlinger, Prof. Jo Van Arkel, Dr. Resa Willis, Dr. Katie Gilbert, Dr. Richard Schur, Dr. Randy Fuller, and Dr. Ken Egan. I also want to thank the Dean‘s office at Drury, most notably Dr. Charles Taylor, for academic and monetary support of my research and this degree program. I also want to thank my patient wife, Annette, for all of the ways she has aided in organizing and formatting this document. Finally, I want to thank all of the students in multiple sections of ENGL 266 and ENGL 366, seated and online, who made the pedagogical trials of my theory so engaging and insightful. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two: A Review of Current Dialogues in Creative Writing Pedagogy, Emotion Theory, and the Affective Turn in Rhetoric and Composition ......................................... 24 Review of Evolving Scholarship on Creative Writing Pedagogy ................................ 25 Review of Rhetorical Scholarship in Theories of Emotion and Affect ....................... 37 Review of Scholarship of the ―Affective Turn‖ in Rhetoric and Composition: .......... 51 Chapter Three: Emotion Memory and Embodiment in the Creative Writing Classroom 61 Emotion Memory and Embodiment ............................................................................. 83 Performance Studies, Emotions, and Writing Workshop Testimonials ....................... 95 Chapter Four: Outlaw Emotions and the Performance of Comportment: Reflections on Putting Emotion Theories into Pedagogical Practice...................................................... 110 Methodology .............................................................................................................. 115 ENGL 366: Qualitative Observations and Responsive Writing Samples .................. 127 Chapter Five: ―No Escaping Feelings‖: Pedagogical Reflections, Bodiless Classrooms and Creative Writing‘s Contributions to a Humanities Education ................................. 169 Reflections on Incorporating Theory into the Craft of Creative Writing................... 171 Testing It Out Online: Embodied Emotions in a Disembodied Classroom ............... 181 Creative Writing, Emotion Work, and the New Humanities ..................................... 190 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 198 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 204 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 214 iii ABSTRACT Although undergraduate creative writing courses routinely ask students to create ―emotionally complex‖ characters, engage peers in the emotionally charged experience of workshopping, and scrutinize their personal investments in a story during its evaluation, very little attention has been paid to emotional schooling in creative writing instruction. When the role of emotion in creative writing is broached, it is typically presented in dualistic terms that preserve a binary opposition of feeling and thinking, even though the need to theorize emotions as a ―tight braid of affect and judgment‖ has already been well- argued in feminist epistemology by Arlie Hochschild (1983) and Alison Jagger (1989), and in rhetoric and composition by Alice Brand (1989, 1994), Lynn Worsham (1998), and Megan Boler (1999). My dissertation argues that the core questions for emotion studies can be read as answers for the problems found in the scholarship of creative writing pedagogy, which currently seeks the ―perfect combination of praxis and theory‖ and continues to argue for emotional investment in the writing process and emotional distancing in the workshop process (Blythe and Sweet 307). Specifically, I demonstrate how concepts from the scholarship on emotions problematize a Gardnerian tradition of pedagogy as well as how Boler‘s ―testimonial readings‖ offer a chance to engage both craft criticism and emotion theory in workshop. I also demonstrate, through pedagogical trials in my own classrooms, how aspects of performance studies pedagogies and recent translations of Stanislavski‘s ―emotion memory‖ can be used to help creative writing students recognize emotions as both personally felt and socially constructed and as bodily sites of oppression and resistance. iv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Despite the exponential growth of creative writing courses and degree programs over the last forty years, scholarship in creative writing pedagogy has been slow-starting, especially when compared to the boom of research in rhetoric and composition during this same era. Twenty years after Wendy Bishop (1991) called for collaboration between compositionists and creative writing faculty and ten years after Judith Harris (2001) proposed collaboration between psychoanalytic theorists and creative writers, the lack of any significant interdisciplinary creative writing pedagogies suggests that Bishop‘s call for ―cross-raiding‖ was alternately met with territorialism and disinterest. Even within the discipline, the majority of creative writing scholarship has either lamented the absence or resented the presence of pedagogical research, which has led to open-ended calls for such studies and little theory to put into practice. In their introduction to ―The Writing Community: A New Model for the Creative Writing Classroom‖ (2008), Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet confess that even though they have taught creative writing for ―a combined seventy years,‖ neither has a well-defined pedagogy and neither had ―even thought about the question of how [they] teach creative writing or [ . ] a single instance of the word pedagogy in grad school‖ (305). The lack of scholarship on creative writing pedagogy reflects a common lack of definition in creative writing‘s tenuous relationship to English departments‘ and humanities‘ curricula in spite of the massive proliferation of creative writing courses and degrees in the postwar era. Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll (2008), who along with Bishop, D.G. Myers, Stephanie Vanderslice, Kelly Ritter, Mark McGurl, and Paul Dawson have initiated recent research into creative writing‘s histories, contingencies, and 1 pedagogies, have also observed that ―creative writing has gone on without change‖ in almost every institution in spite of the ―amazing‖ and transfiguring impact it has had ―upon the life of academe‖ (6-7). Louis Menand and others have echoed Harper and Kroll‘s ―relative invisibility, yet considerable impact‖ thesis in recent pieces for The New Yorker (2009) and in response to Mark McGurl‘s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2010), which posits that the rise of the creative writing workshop is the ―most important event in postwar American literary history‖ (ix). With the AWP currently reporting the existence of over 115 MFA programs