4 Creative Writing and Critical Theory Lauri Ramey Background on the ‘creative’ versus ‘critical’ opposition Slightly more than one hundred years ago, it was arguable that there was such a field as lit- erary study. Language was a proper field of study, but some late nineteenth-century figures including James Russell Lowell, Thomas H. Hunt and Calvin Thomas began to argue that if philology were to be made practical, it could be applied usefully to literature. The most frequent rationales for the academic study of literature were that poems, novels, essays and plays often showed the greatest skill in the use of language; their mastery was a valuable intellectual and moral exercise in putting one’s knowledge of languages to work; and prop- erly chosen texts could exemplify the most admirable human traits and aspirations. Lowell provided this metaphor in 1889: instead of teaching ‘purely the linguistic side of things’, language study should lead to something better. And that something better is Literature. The blossoms of language have cer- tainly as much value as its roots, for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of the mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful. (Lowell 1889: 1737) The two aspects of literary study are harmoniously connected in Lowell’s vision of roots representing the literary and linguistic past and blossoms as the creation of new writing. But his metaphor points ahead to precisely the pedagogical and intellectual schism that later arose in the post-philology development of literature and creative writing in the drive for connoisseurship combined with the pragmatics of inspiring new literature. The bifur- cation of the field of literary studies was inherent from its inception. For example, when Stanford University was founded in the 1890s, two pre-eminent scholars were hired for its newly-formed department of English: Ewald Flugel, trained as a philologist in Leipzig in the scientific study of language; and Melville Best Anderson from Iowa, a poetry specialist who viewed literature as a source of moral uplift (Carnochan 2000: 1958–9). Creative writing as an academic subject developed at approximately the same time as English, and out of the same desire, which was to rectify the ‘impracticality’ of philology. EB001 - EARNSHAW m-up 08Jan.qxp:EB001 - Sample.qxd 12/1/07 10:03 Page 42