Creative Critical

Abstract

Creative critical is not a term I have ever used. I would prefer not to. In the same breath I imagine Bartleby saying so too, for example, when he is confronted by someone asking if he would concur that the text of 1853 in which he first appears is an early example of the “creative critical.” In just such demurring direction I have argued that Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” resists all such attempts at fixing and categorization and affirms instead the art of “veering” (Melville [1853] 2002: 23; Royle 2011: 163–68). Creative writing, on the other hand, is a term that makes me want to curl up and die. It has always had this effect on me. The mushrooming of creative writing courses and degree programs in colleges and universities across the world in recent decades has done nothing to diminish its toxic character for me. As Andrew Bennett and I note in a chapter on “Creative Writing” written for the 2004 edition of our textbook Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory, traces of the poison could be detected in the then-current definition of the adjective creative in the OED: “Specifically of literature and art, thus also of a writer or artist: inventive, imaginative; exhibiting imagination as well as intellect, and thus differentiated from the merely critical, “academic,” journalistic, professional, mechanical, etc., in literary or artistic production. So creative writing, such writing” (OED, sense 1b; bold text in original). In firmly distinguishing the creative from “the merely critical, ‘academic,’ journalistic, professional, mechanical, etc.,” the dictionary compelled us to ask, “But how seriously can we take this distinction? Is there nothing ‘creative’ about other sorts of writing?” (Bennett and Royle 2004: 85). We were citing the 1989 edition of the OED. With its third edition in 2010, however, the editors seem to have noticed the problem. The current entry for creative runs: “Inventive, imaginative; of, relating to, displaying, using, or involving imagination or original ideas as well as routine skill or intellect, esp. in literature or art. Cf. creative writer, n., creative writing, n.” (sense 1b). This gets the OED out of its bad (the implication that critical or “academic” writing just isn’t and simply cannot be creative), although it introduces an ambiguous new implication: that literature and art can or should be conceived in