The write research
by Michèle Nardelli
For Professor Graeme Harper - novelist, cultural critic, scriptwriter, academic and commentator on the place of creative writing practice in universities - his enduring exuberance about the future possibilities for teaching and researching creative writing is evident after just one meeting with him.
The Australian academic, now based at Bangor University in Wales, spent two weeks at UniSA this month as a Visiting Professor in the School of Communications, International Studies and Languages, packing in a busy program that included workshops at the SA Writers Centre; meetings with UniSA staff about the research assessment processes being established in the UK; a special poetry and poetics symposium; interviews; and a little time to re-engage with the Australian academic scene.
Prof Harper believes there is a strong and developing future for practice-based research in the field and he sees Australia as a world leader in the development of doctoral studies in creative writing.
"There has been some resist-ance to the whole concept of teaching creative writing as a postgraduate or research subject," Prof Harper says.
"We have been much more comfortable in the literary criticism space because it is more assessable and has a more obvious or traditional structure around it.
"Literary criticism is a post-event concept - you examine work after the action has taken place. What is challenging about creative writing in the academic framework as it exists today is that creative writing is the event."
He says while there are a range of challenging issues thrown up around assessment and the actual concept of creative writing research, he believes developments in Australia are extremely positive.
Assessment in the field generally requires candidates to submit a creative work and a thesis that analyses the process of creative writing. Examples might include a selection of short stories and then an analysis of the process around their development.
"We are discovering in this process, not only what a creative work looks like, but what motivates and influences the process, what the writers’ responses are and how they contribute the active aspects of creative writing.
"At the end of the day this is not about teaching fame or success in an old century notion of being published - it is about understanding more fully the creative process."
It is almost 20 years since the first postgraduate creative writing programs began in Australia.
Prof Harper says as such, creative writing in the university context is still relatively new. And in the context of Australia’s recent Research Quality Framework and Excellence for Research in Australia, as well as similar reviews in the UK (Research Excellence Framework), there has been much debate surrounding its academic validity and specifically the measurement of the impact of such research.
"If you sit with a definition of impact that is essentially economic, there can be a struggle to make the argument," he says.
"In fact the arts generally can struggle in any framework that identifies only science, technology, engineering and medicine as stem or core fields.
"However if you examine the evolution of the field in the context of the burgeoning communications environment that has evolved in the past 20 years, there is a fundamental link between creative writing and a new era of technology-mediated communications.
"In the modern world of Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, citizen journalism, online books and blogs, it is quite clear why we should be spending time researching creativity and creative writing."
Creative writing at UniSA
Professor Harper visited UniSA as a guest of the Poetry and Poetics Centre, headed up by Dr Ioana Petrescu where students can study for their Doctor in Communications and have the option to produce a thesis that incorporates an artefact or a piece of creative writing.
The PhD theses are made up of two parts, an exegesis and then an artefact such as a novel, a collection of poetry or another significant piece of creative writing.
Several students in the school are working towards their PhDs on this basis and Dr Robert Bloomfield has just been awarded his PhD which included a novel as part of his submission to examiners.
More information about studying creative writing at UniSA and postgraduate studies in communications is available from the school and more information is available from Dr Petrescu at Ioana.petrescu@unisa.edu.au