Since the publication of Wendy Bishop’s Released into Language (1990), the disciplinary boundaries of composition and creative writing have been in question. More recently, as Douglas Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” (2010) suggests, creative writing has been assumed to exist as a subdiscipline of composition despite efforts during the past decade to develop a new discipline, Creative Writing Studies. The research reported on and analyzed here argues for creative writing’s disciplinary status by using Toulmin’s (1972) definition of disciplinarity as a basis for claiming writers’ aesthetic documents as data and reporting those data in an aesthetic form. In our study, 57 students in first-year composition were asked to write a creative piece concerning how they came to the present place in their lives. Students produced 57 artifacts, including 55 poems, one script, and one visual narrative. These data were subsequently represented in fiction—that is, we used a novel to present our findings in an effort to assert the differences between the ways findings might be rendered in composition as opposed to creative writing. This paper examines what each subject area views as evidence and how that evidence might be most profitably analyzed and discussed in an aesthetic document. We suggest that the process of writing the novel is a method, a mode of analysis, with the novel itself as the articulation of the researchers’ analysis of the original data. Using this method, we studied creative writing aesthetically as creative writing and offer a justification for doing so.

In this essay, two poets who have taught language learners in the United States and abroad argue for the use of personal writing, preferably poetry from students’ home cultures, as a bridge to writing in academic genres.

Reconsideration of the late Wendy Bishop’s work should involve taking seriously her proposal that composition studies turn to the self-reports of writers, including creative writers.

This essay considers why some subjects associated with English studies achieve disciplinary status while others, such as theory and multicultural literature, fail to do so, suggesting that what is required for such status is the establishment of epistemological difference from other areas in the field. The author uses the example of creative writing’s emergence as a model of what it means to achieve disciplinary status, what benefits accrue to a field that does, and who stands to gain from that emergence.

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eaching and the 'Alternative' Writer by Richard Kostelanetz is about Richard Kostelanetz: whether Richard wants to take a university teaching position if one is offered; what he might teach if he does take such a position; and how he might avoid becoming an academic of the sort he describes, having so easily divided the universe of writers in this country into independents and academics. First, let me say that I have long known and admired Richard's work (though I have never met him) and that I hope his artistic productivity continues long into the future, perhaps untainted by the university work he contemplates doing. Second, let me say for the time being that I will not attack this essay for its obvious use of easy binaries (e.g., the independent writer/academic writer split); it is unnecessary to do so. What I would like to do is offer a reading of Richard's essay by placing it in the context of both the isolation voiced by others in the profession as well as the loneliness I have expressed unconsciously in three pieces I have written at different times during my career. My point is that some of the feelings Richard expresses evoke certain strong feelings in me. Not what Richard says, but how he says it, brings to mind for me a session I attended last year at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), a session that introduced me to what for lack of a better phrase we might call rhetorics of emotion. I believe Richard has written such a piece. Unknowingly over the past twenty years, I believe I have too.

Patrick Bizzaro, What I Learned in Grad School, or Literary Training and the Theorizing of Composition, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 4, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 722-742

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