Creative Writing and Research: Between Two Worlds 

 

A creative writer who is at the same time an academic is often caught between two worlds. On the one hand, as an academic, one understands post-structuralist arguments to do with the fictive and non-essentialist nature of the self. On the other hand, as a creative writer, one has to attend to the interiority of the self, to take one’s self seriously. Roland Barthes himself is aware that the author, for the creative writer, cannot really be dead. In Camera Lucida, Barthes wrote of “a discomfort [he] had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical” (8). This, then, is an impasse. Yet I would argue that there are ways to turn this into a productive situation. By looking at various issues to do with practice, meaning-making, interiority and the socio-political, my talk will engage with tasks that await the creative writing academic.