"Creative Critique/Critical Creativity: Scholarship and Creative Practice"
A panel of the Graduate Student Caucus, MLA 2006

The Graduate Student Caucus, an affiliate organization of the MLA, is pleased to invite current
graduate students to submit proposals for 20 minute papers for a panel discussion titled "Creative
Critique/Critical Creativity: Scholarship and Creative Practice" at the 2006 MLA annual meeting,
12/27/06-12/30/06 in Philadelphia, PA.

Recent decades have seen the creation of literary forms that merge or blur the boundaries between
fiction and non-fiction; the development of critical practices attentive to the style, figures,
and forms of theoretical and philosophical writing; an increase in the importance of MFA programs
in and to English and Literature departments; and the emergence of literary and poetic movements
engaged in questions once thought to be the sole domain of theory and academic scholarship. All of
these developments have led to the growing relevance of work that crosses the disciplines,
mediums, and styles of various modes of "creative" practice with those of so-called "critical" or
"academic" work, yet in many ways the institutional divisions between creative writing and
theory--at the level of publication, pedagogy, employment, and departmental division--remain
solidly and resolutely in place.

For this panel, we are interested in graduate student work that bridges the creative and the
critical, or papers about the possibilities for and vexations of such work. We imagine that
examples of "critical creativity" might be described by the following basic categories:
• Work that mixes the styles or forms of creative/literary writing and those of academic prose,
such as work that incorporates creative non-fiction or memoir within critical argument
• Creative work (poetry, creative non-fiction or fiction as well as work in non-literary art
forms) that, even as a separate project, supplements, extends, or informs the scholar's academic
work
• Creative work that investigates or is explicitly informed by the questions and concerns of
theory, philosophy, or literary/linguistic criticism
These descriptions are intended to be as flexible and capacious as possible; as this is a panel
precisely about the imprecision of firm distinctions of style, form, and genre, we welcome
submissions that do not clearly fall into any of the categories above. And, since the panel is
intended to focus specifically on graduate student scholarship, we especially encourage papers
that think practically and critically about the particular challenges--methodological,
professional, institutional--that face graduate students engaged in this kind of inter- or
cross-disciplinary work.

Please submit an abstract of about 500 words, along with a cover letter, by March 1, 2006, to
Annie McClanahan at ajmcc_at_berkeley.edu. Please put "MLA panel submission" in the subject line.

For more information contact:
Annie McClanahan
GSC Vice-President
English Department
University of California Berkeley
ajmcc_at_berkeley.edu

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Received on Tue Feb 07 2006 - 13:17:09 EST