I was a student of Professor Muecke, non the less I found this article
very interesting so pass it along for other readers.


http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/muecke.htm

Stephen Muecke
Public thinking, public feeling: research tools for Creative Writing  

Now supposing that when a novel comes out it is acknowledged as a
brilliant work. I have sketched in a preliminary fashion how it is the
product not so much of an individual mind, but of a networked set of
social and institutional arrangements that propel it in a position to be
judged as brilliant. But now I want to work back from that to ask how it
might justify all that social and institutional investment. Various
social factors have contributed to this 'investment': students creating
a market, universities investing in new professors of writing at the
expense of professors of literature, cities investing in writing
festivals, high school curricula including creative writing extension
papers, readers and advertisers sustaining the public sphere of review
sections of newspapers and the publishing houses themselves. The next
step, given the involvement of universities in the training of both
sophisticated readers and writers, is how creative work can be
configured as research and assessed alongside any other Discovery or
Linkage Grant at the ARC.

What academics produce as research 'outcomes' in creative arts now
rarely takes the form of commentary, critical or otherwise, on others'
creative work. More often we are composing our own works. In other words
we have shifted from appreciation to production, from critical
difference to a sense of progressive engagement from which there is no
pause. And yet the critical or technical vocabulary we use to talk about
texts has not really caught up with this shift. In moving towards a
productive, post-critical research vocabulary, we may have to reconsider
our histories in lit. crit., semiotics or critical discourse analysis,
and look at contemporary interactions with texts that are not based just
on the hermeneutic drive ('what it means') but also on what it does in a
nervous, tactile and infectious way, and on how creative texts are
dispersed and fragmented in and across digital technologies. I mention
the digital sphere because language, the medium for writers of all
sorts, is also a database and a social networking tool.

Let's observe the writer writing. She is seated at a multimedia
terminal, her intelligence and memory externalised and expanded to a
whole world of data, just as it always was with language, but now on a
global scale. Her text thus emerges in the interstices of a hypertext
environment. It is composed, as always, but now less historically, now
more laterally and (dare I say) rhizomically. The anxiety of the
influence of the national canon persists to the extent that there are a
few paperback editions of favorite texts on the desk beside the
terminal, but the filiations can be imagined in all directions, not just
in that historical line of descent as if she is standing, as they say,
on the shoulders of giants. 

-- 
have chronic fatigue syndrome so may be delayed in reply or brain fog weird

just to let you know that's all, Chris Jones.

Blog: http://abdevpoetics.blogspot.com/