Teaching - English Language, Creative Writing, Education - United States - History, Teaching - Writing, Education - History - General & Miscellaneous, Rhetoric - English Language

The Elephants Teach : Creative Writing since 1880

Name: The Elephants Teach : Creative Writing since 1880
Author: D. G. Myers
ISBN: 9780133240139

by D. G. Myers

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Overview

The Elephants Teach is a captivating account of how creative writing has become an integral part of our culture since the last decades of the nineteenth century. A story of the American will-to-art, it also offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the development of English as a field of study. D.G. Myers argues that English has been split into three rival and antagonist fields: composition, literary scholarship, and the constructive art of literature, which includes both creative writing and literary criticism. He traces this split from the earliest days of the discipline, when it was called philology, through the rise of English composition and the critical wars of the thirties, down to the present. Along the way, he tells how poets and writers turned to university teaching as a means of economic support, restoring a neglected chapter in the history of American authorship and literary education.

This book traces the development of "creative" writing as a classroom subject, the teaching of fiction- and verse-writing; and as a national system for the employment of fiction writers and poets to teach the subject. It answers the questions, "Why has fiction and verse writing come to be called creative?" and "When and why was this term first used?"