Composition, Creative Writing Studies, and the Digital Humanities

In an era of blurred generic boundaries, multimedia storytelling, and open-source culture, creative writing scholars stand poised to consider the role that technology-and the creative writer's playful engagement with technology-has occupied in the evolution of its theory and practice. Composition, Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities is the first book to bring these three fields together to open up new opportunities and directions for creative writing studies. Placing the rise of Creative Writing Studies alongside the rise of the digital humanities in Composition/Rhetoric, Adam Koehler shows that the use of new media and its attendant re-evaluation of fundamental assumptions in the field stands to guide Creative Writing Studies into a new era. Covering current developments in composition and the digital humanities, this book re-examines established assumptions about process, genre, authority/authorship and pedagogical practice in the creative writing classroom.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Chapter 1. Digital Pasts: On Composition, Creative Writing, and Emerging Technologies Chapter 2. Defining Digital Creative Writing Studies Chapter 3. Ideology, Subjectivity, and the Creative Writer in the Digital Age Chapter 4. Process, Genre, and Technologizing the Word Chapter 5. Fenceless Neighbors: On Composition, Creative Writing, and Emerging Institutional Practices Notes Works Cited and Consulted Index

About the Author :
Adam Koehler is Associate Professor of English at Manhattan College, USA.

Review :
Essential reading for undergraduate and graduate-level creative writers who teach, particularly those who question the traditional workshop emphasis on publication and who are open to fecund combinations of rule-breaking, literary conventions, and new media … Composition, Creative Writing Studies, and the Digital Humanities unpacks more than three decades of scholarship to establish another nascent field, digital creative writing studies … [It] advance[s] the rigor of creative writing as an academic discipline with deep ties to the sister world of composition and rhetoric while nudging teacher-writers toward innovative, process-oriented pedagogies and heuristics. [Koehler's] work on the recent Kenneth Goldsmith controversy is up-to-the minute and relevant ... Another highlight of this work, for me, was the patient and steady assault on Jonathan Franzen's continued arguments against digital practices. Composition, Creative Writing and the Digital Humanities is essential reading for any writer, writing teacher or writing scholar who recognizes that writing in the 21st century is inextricably bound to technology. By establishing, via the Digital Humanities, a “point of contact,” between creative writing and composition studies as they converge and diverge, Adam Koehler recognizes and then maps the “shared space” between these two fields of writing studies, presciently locating digital modality in this intersection and describing its potential for not only illuminating and re-weaving these strands of scholarship together into something new, but also for creating both new texts and new knowledge. A visionary, landscape-altering book, I will be recommending and teaching from it for a long time to come.