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Non Fiction
I want to look into writing which is more angled to literary essays, but not wholly to literary criticism: something useful to creative writing classes. It has come about because of the process I used in writing the poetry sequence 'How they Speak'. That sequence relies so heavily on the external environment becoming a trigger for an inner psychological process that it got me thinking about all those stories from Odysseus onwards, which refer to myth and gods.
I began to question the assumptions we seem to have culturally, that when works refer frequently to myth and myths in turn refer typically to gods, deities, etc. that the experiences expressed; the forest and the seas which are given personas for example, all somehow point to a religious interpretation.
I wonder if this is always true? If you look at the way male film characters talk in the '70s, you can see the first attempts at post '60s language emerging; the development of the significance of emotional intelligence, the desire to challenge gender assumptions.
This means the way art deals with and comes to terms with emotion and psychology evolves. It doesn't start as a complete knowledge and then permeate all future works.
What if, in those earlier works of literature, we are not looking strictly at myth and religion as a belief but at writers trying to develop our inner world for the first time - by using the outer to express it, in the absence of tools such as psychology; a discipline not yet invented? If this is possible then perhaps each mention of an epic journey, a god, a divine figure, magic, is not actually an attempt to keep the divine on board at all; it is the opposite in fact - it is an attempt to express ourselves in the human moment. It is perhaps early existentialism - one foot in front of the other for survival every step of the way in the absence of, or at least regardless of, god (s).
I am especially interested in how this could get people thinking in creative writing classes, now. Especially with regard to the writing process of the Romantics. Because there is in that genre a very tangible tension between significance to people of religion and the increasing awareness of self at the centre of art and life.
And how significant now in our society is the resultant tension between those who would rely on religion and those who would rely on the existential moment?
The current cult of celebrity also raises questions as to where the individual sits within the digital age and the significance of a single creative act is debated every day across You Tube, Facebook: raised to significance (and simultaneously insignificance, due to the sheer volume of information we are able to produce).
As the Romantics were concerned also with how our moral and spiritual life sat with the Industrial Revolution, there will be parallels now to this pattern of production versus nature and individuality.
And how frequent now, are our dilemmas in a globalised world, as to how far art is truly representative or if it should even try to be so?
"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, May 1819
Of course there is one central paradox to this: that the Romantics wrote around the time of social upheaval, not least the French and American revolutions which prompted many challenges to the definition of art. How can a creative writing student looking back at a past form claim to be finding their own revolution?
All new forms must break the past and therefore they implicitly refer to it. That element of destruction is inherent in each creative act. And if we re-apply the questions of the Romantics to our own times and redefine them then we might once again re-imagine of ourselves. Perhaps this time as more than pale faces under the wan lighting of Tesco, which is at least one point of art if there is any point to art at all...
I am currently seeking funding and scholarships for postgraduate study - specifically to look into how a revisit to Romantic concerns can inform today's creative writing students in the classroom and beyond.
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