Remix perspectives: Transdisciplinary insights for the art of writing (original) (raw)

Remix Perspective: Transdisciplinary Insights for the Art of Writing

2013

How do creative writers transform the complexity of life into literature? Remix Perspectives presents a bricolage synthesis of transdisciplinary insights for workshop leaders and creative writers, appropriated from selected artistic and literary voices from more or less the last hundred years. Seminal concepts from arts such as painting, poetry, dance, music, and photography are gathered here as they inform the arts of literary fiction and creative nonfiction. Thinkers from philosophy, psychology, literary theory, complexity, and metaphysics address the inner and outer realms where the work of the writer is generated and goes forth

Braiding: Using and Understanding Complexity in Creative Nonfiction

This critical thesis examines the structure of braiding and how two authors use it to depict complex topics: BK Loren in her essay “The Evolution of Hunger” and Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby. The structure for a braided essay includes three types of strands: the research line, the narrative through line, and the past-tense strand. This thesis probes techniques to braid themes, such as direct statements, using related scenes and terms, theme variations, and other types of intertwining. Techniques for guiding the reader through complexity are analyzed, such as how Loren connects strand types and how they both use clear first sentences. Finally, it also shows how the authors use braiding to explore complex feelings about family members.

Multiple selves, multiple voices, multiple genres: reflections in writing and art making

Reflective Practice, 2018

In this article, I use the method of 'talking to myself' as a mode of critical reflection about the practices of art making and art writing. This 'reflective conversation' manifested the multiple voices of the dialogic self who either thwarted me or spurred me on, in the process of writing. The article presents reflection as a conflict between an authentic reflection which is true to one's sense of lived being with the requirements to fit within a particular writing genre suitable for a disciplinary tribe that may reject or support the particular method of reflection. I suggest that attending to, and critically reflecting upon, our internal dialogue and acknowledging its conflictual nature can be a sustained process of reflection where different points of view are explored, questioned, reinterpreted and reshaped. The conversation with my multiple selves is presented in the form of a play script as an authentic format to capture multiple selves interacting. In so doing, I reflect upon artistic practice and its relationship to thought, reflection and action.

Writing from within the creative process

2010

In this text we discuss the role of writing in artistic research and the importance of developing language, form and content that suits research in Fine Art, drawing from the Post Modern critique of Western epistemology. We search for a new kind of writing that accompanies the often uncontrollable creative process of art making. We choose to call this reflective writing. By means of a text-production that accompanies the artistic process from within, it is possible to write away from the analytical distance that otherwise characterizes the (critical) art text, and that tend to render us a critic of our own art. We write ourselves out from academic traditions, using examples from our own artistic practices. The reflective texts are complemented by critical writing, typographically separated on the pages. Hence two levels, or layers, of writing are multi-vocally intertwined, contradicting and communicating in the same text. Writing out from within. Is it possible to write the artistic...

Literary Theory and Creative Writing, a Blended Space For Producing Literary Works

Linguists : Journal Of Linguistics and Language Teaching, 2016

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the method for analysing literary works. Literary Theory is an examination of a piece of literature which can be addressed to examine a single aspect of the work in its entirety By literary theory we assume not to the meaning of work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literary works can mean. Moreover creative writing focuses on writing from emotions and thoughts which tends to be expressive, imaginative, and literary. Any writing refers to individual expression as a social practice falls to this category. It is believed that creative writing cannot be formed as an acquaintance outside literary theory instead of one that is fashioned within. This paper looks at how creative writing and literary theory should be combined for producing fine-new literary works.

Visualizing fiction, verbalizing art, or from intermediation to transculturation

World literature studies, 2015

Preliminary remarks Comparative literature as a typical 19 th-century positivist and Eurocentric discipline was based on specific analytical operations such as comparison, looking for similarities rather than differences, and rigid disciplinary and geo-local divisions. It operated in terms of influences, borrowings, typological affinities and constellation of national literatures within the restricted core-European idea of world literature and habitually sought Oriental and African motifs in Western fiction and never the other way round, because it was grounded in the modern human taxonomy constructing a negative image of the other in order to affirm the same. 1 Today the previous division into the West and the rest is dysfunctional at best, as serious and ironic borrowings and influences work both ways-which does not mean that the structural asymmetries are gone. Western and non-Western theorists have come up with different definitions for this complex and chaotic contemporary situation. French aesthetician Nicolas Bourriaud addresses this tendency under the name of altermodern aesthetics, which has appropriated and politically neutered the concepts of transit and creolization borrowed from the postcolonial genealogy of knowledge (2009b). Bourriaud claims that both postmodernism and multiculturalism are now passé and we are living in a homogenous global culture of mixed and lost origins, marked by intensified and simplified contacts, journeys and migrations, translations and subtitles, a culture from which any artist regardless of his or her genealogy can borrow techniques and devices. The main motif of altermodernity then is wandering in time, space and various media forms (2005). Arguing with Bourriaud and other Western neo-universalizing positions that ignore and erase the continuing structural inequalities and lingering Western canonical dominance, decolonial artists, theorists and activists have come up with a different transmodern (in the sense of overcoming modernity) idea of aesthesis instead, as opposed to the Western-tailored aesthetics (Estéticas Decoloniales 2010, Mignolo 2013, Tlostanova 2013). This ongoing debate demonstrates the way the old Orientalism/Occidentalism divisions are being reformulated in today's glocalized culture. The two important contemporary tendencies in the interaction of art and fiction can be defined as transculturation and intermediation, marked by specific forms of

Conversations with Althusser, Bakhtin and Genette: The influence of theory on creative practice

Text, 2016

This paper offers a personal reflection on how the study of creative writing within an institutional context can influence personal creative practice. It examines how engagement with a range of theoretical approaches can help evolve both writing and thinking. Beginning with an overview of the debate within the creative writing discipline on the benefits that an awareness of critical theory provides to the practitioner, this paper provides a reflection on how exposure to Marxist, semiotic, poststructuralist, and gender theory can stimulate thorough consideration of the separation between ideas and words. Using Louis Althusser's discussion of class and personal agency in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Mikhail Bakhtin's semiotic examination of form and ideology in Discourse in the Novel as examples, this paper speculates on the practitioner's agency in the creative process. Judith Butler's work on the performative nature of gender construction, Roland Barthes' Death of the Author, and Hélène Cixous' Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, are cited in relation to how an engagement with the critical can encourage and influence the writing process. Gérard Genette's writing on narratology is also considered in order to speculate on the utility that an understanding of narratology provides to the practitioner. This paper concludes with a reflection on the benefits that maintaining a sense of fun provides in the pursuit of a meaningful dialogue between the critical and the poetic. It suggests that an interaction with theory can assist practitioners when reflecting on the intricacies and influences implicit in the creative process. It argues that considered engagement with theory leads to better writing.