A ‘Cognitive Turn’ in Creative Writing – Cognition, Body and Imagination

Abstract

The discipline of creative writing has been fairly slow to take up theoretical issues raised by the ‘cognitive turn’ in literary studies, which was framed and debated as a disciplinary area in Poetics Today in 2002–2003. Yet cognitive approaches offer ways to conceptualise the nature of creative writing, contributing to quite complex articulations of what occurs in the writing process. How might consideration of the writer as ‘whole person’, in thought, feeling and action, contribute to the way we conceptualise creative writing? To what extent is writing ‘as thought’ – as an embodied process of ‘making’ – generated within the ‘inner’ writer's mind? And, what is the relationship between thought, feeling and imagination in writing? This essay argues that cognitive science, far more than cognitive literary theory, provides new frameworks that extend the way we think about the human practice of creative writing. Drawing on research areas of situated cognition, embodied cognition, affect theory and neuroscience, the essay examines how this research can shed light on relationships of mind, thought and body to creative writing.

Keywords:

• cognitive turn creative writing
• writing and cognition
• situated cognition
• embodied cognition
• affect theory
• neuroscience

Notes on contributor

Marcelle Freiman lectures in English and Creative Writing at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is researching creative writing and cognition, ekphrasis, post-colonial literatures, and poetry. Her publications appear in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, and collections Creative Writing: Theory beyond practice (Eds. Krauth and Brady) and The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, (Eds. Cousins and Howarth). Her poetry book publications are Monkey's Wedding (Island Co-op, NSW) and White Lines (Vertical) (Hybrid Publishers, Vic.); and in Australian literary journals, including Westerly, Southerly, Cordite, Meniscus and Antipodes.

Notes

1. An exception to this is Sue Woolfe (2007), an exploration, from a writer's perspective, of the science and psychology of creativity.

2. Poetics Today 23: 1 (2002), 23: 2 (2002), 24: 2 (2003).

3. Richardson and Steen refer to Roman Jakobson 1960.

4. Oatley and Djikic refer to Gerrig (1993) and Zwaan (1999).

5. See also Abbott 2008: 91–95.

6. A more detailed discussion of the ideas canvassed in this section is in Freiman (2009).

7. Shouse refers to Massumi 2002 Parables for the Virtual, Durham, Duke U. Press.

8. ‘While it is not possible to extrapolate conscious experience and what occurs within the mind, both of which are subjective experience, from the millions of patterns of neurological messages and areas of activity in the brain, which are an “objective” (observable) model of knowledge, it is possible to have “an epistemically objective science of consciousness even though it is an ontologically subjective phenomenon”’ (Searle 2013, n.p.n.). Searle refers to Damasio as one of the researchers successfully working within this possibility.