In Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing

This project looks at the role, function, and implementation of creative writing in the academia. It takes issue with the shifting figurations of the academic poet/writer's role in relation to the university. The questions of relevance here are both related to genre and poetics, and to method, thus extending an argument about the use of various strategies of creative writing within the academia. For instance: must the poet be a practitioner of a 'poetry of knowledge' in order for him to gain teaching credentials and legitimation? How is erudition perceived in relation to other cognitive and emotional factors, such as interpretation, creativity, imagination, inspiration? I intend to not only use but also perform comparative approaches to creative writing across disciplines in an entangled discussion of transatlantic differences (the American tradition vs. the European) of, for instance, generic aspects of literary concepts, such as the fragment, the aphorism, the epitaph, and the epigraph, and poetry as philosophy and philosophy as poetic scholarship. I am particularly interested in devising epistemic rules for such performative acts that combine an autobiographical mode with formal philosophy and poetry.

Some related research and activities so far:

My latest book, Pulverizing Portraits, introduces some notions about creative writing as it happens, as it is practiced by Lynn Emanuel who is a professor of English and creative writing at University of Pittsburgh.

I’ve organized a panel for the upcoming ESSE-10 conference in Torino: Creative Writing - The Missing Link in the Academia.