The anxiety of confluence: theory in and with creative writing

The Anxiety of Confluence is the first truly concerted attempt to theorise some of the major issues facing the discipline of Creative Writing today. Taking as its basis the meta-Creative Writing discourse – that body of texts written by Creative Writing academics reflecting upon their own discipline – it identifies three significant points of anxiety which have arisen as a result of Creative Writing’s relatively recent entry into the academy: authorship, the supplementary discourse, and research. A chapter is dedicated to each of these issues, each time beginning with a broad analysis of the discourse in order to identify the specific locus of the anxiety as represented by Creative Writing’s own practitioners, and then re-approaching that anxiety through the theoretical work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gerard Genette, in order to find new ways of thinking about and understanding what happens when Creative Writing is undertaken as an academic discipline. While this discourse analysis is wideranging and interested in finding commonality, the theoretical response restricts itself to one or two texts at a time, as rather than instituting points of contact between Creative Writing and theory as whole bodies of work, the aim in each chapter is to develop in some detail a theoretical account which resonates specifically with the discipline. At the same time, however, it comes to be seen that much of Creative Writing’s anxiety is presaged by analogous tensions in literary theory and criticism, and that the barrier between these terms is not as strong as people on either side of it may believe. The fourth chapter therefore breaks with this methodology in order to performatively explore, in a creative critical mode, the potential interfusion of Creative Writing, criticism, and theory which the previous three chapters have created a space for