IN CITE: Epistemologies of Creative Writing ? Camelia Elias ? Books

July 12, 2012 ?

WORK IN PROGRESS ? FORTHCOMING SOON

I very recently met a man who said how do you do. A splendid story.

?Gertrude Stein

There is one obvious thing that academic writing and creative writing have in common: the fact that they are prompted by occasion. But whereas the first has research at its basis, the second relies more on inspiration. And whereas research has the formulation of what is found, and the dissemination of knowledge as its primary aim, inspiration adds a poetic touch to how knowledge is formulated. The writer who does both research and is not afraid of inspiration thus seeks to strike a symmetrical balance between reflective thought and creative thought, between belief in the power of the text and love of words. The best practitioners of creative academic writing are the ones who can devise strategies for entangling institutionalized formalism with inspiration. What is achieved in this endeavor is a kind of continuous symmetry which ties knowledge to beauty. What mediates the passage from knowledge to beauty, or some other hierophantic manifestation which beauty also is, is an intuitive idea corresponding to the concept of viewing some symmetries as motion as opposed to symmetry as reflection, which enhances the flipping of thought from one state to another, say, from analysis to inspiration. In fields other than mathematics, where these concepts are thoroughly formalized, the understanding of how an academic writer writes creatively can be formulated along similar lines where we can see epistemic inquiry as aiming for symmetry in motion whereas the ontological status of text and writer can be perceived as a kind of reflection symmetry. The text mirrors the author who mirrors the text. Time, space, and culturally bound. Thus where reflection in general can be considered a response to a writer?s questions of representation, motion represents the represented, all according to how knowledge is formulated in the way: as attitude, ability, belief, or something else.

In this book project I?look at what can be termed epistemic creative writing, or the writing that creates knowledge. I?m interested in analyzing various authors who have been acutely aware of the fact that what they were doing, apart from writing beautiful and intelligent prose and poetry, setting schools, or inventing new poetics ? the surrealists are a good example ? was also to theorize on what it means to create in context, yet formally speaking, which may seem paradoxical.

Stay tuned for more.

Source: http://cameliaelias.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/in-cite-epistemologies-of-creative-writing/

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