ed 366 967 aut7or title institution report no pub date note ... - ERIC

10 Reconsidering the MrkshopJune 13. 1991Dear Gene,The workshops of the past you describe these nostalgic days of gentleformalism that is those days when you could know what type of storyyou were reading you could as a reader know this you knew how toread this and that type of story you could name each type and itsconventions and you could know success and failure and how toremedy failure. Everyone could agree on this everyone could read andeveryone could write within a frame then, it was separate from a wallthat surrounded it and within that specific frame (everyone could namethem, everyone could agree on them) there were rules of compositionyou could agree on rules of the game that were shared. This seems ahappy social homogeneity in which the rules of the workshop weregeneric conventions you knew what to say within this agreed-uponframe. there was a frame for discourse, it was stable, it was groundedon something outside of itself, some well-known conventions (they areimplicit) and of course it did not vary very muchit was stable, itwas static.What has changed?(Would you say the creative writing workshop is the last bastion offormalism? That, by its very status as marginal to the academicenterprise, it is the last to respond to the radical changes in literarytheory?)What has changed?Number one I'd venture is the shift in focus from the text asautonomous object to text as a construction of the reader. Here thefocus is on the reader and as you focus on the reader constructing atext, a whole new set of considerations emerge that were suppressed ina formalist perspective. Virtually all post-formalist theories have contributedto this elevation and redefinition of the role of the reader froma neutral observer to an active participant.The reading model assumed in your former workshops is a limited,specific case of reading as production: reader's expectations are definedas generic conventions to be met or overturned, a particular conventionof reading too limited to address the more interesting questions contemporaryliterary theorists would ask, like "Who defined these genres?"A loaded question that suddenly expands the field of critical visionfrom the neat isolation of the work by itself, its rules and conventions(this provides a common ground for us to frame our workshopdiscourse), a whole field of vision formalist strategies evaded, that isthe focus of contemporary theories, all the political ard ideological"4