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Graduate studies

Unique in Canada

UVic's grad program is the only one of three in Canada offering an MFA in writing, rather than an MA in English with a creative-writing option.

We are also the only Canadian institution with an emphasis not only on writing but on the  teaching  of writing, which is a specialized area of education. You'll take on teaching assistantships to gain experience in evaluating and assisting undergrads, and to acquire actual classroom teaching skills in the area of writing (rather than in English literature). Our program is designed so that teaching will be one of the skills you'll graduate with, to better prepare you for the job market.

MFA in Creative Writing

Our MFA program offers you:

• a supportive environment in which to create a publishable or producible body of work in one of five genres (fiction, creative nonfiction, playwriting, film and poetry), and
• training in the teaching of creative writing at the post-secondary level and for community groups.

You will work closely with internationally known and published faculty who respect and encourage their creative visions and voices. Through participation in workshop classes that simulate an editorial environment of critical feedback and positive reinforcement, you can develop a significant body of work in your genre.

Our department is connected to the lively literary community of Greater Victoria through off-campus readings and events, including the Open Word reading series and the Victoria Festival of Authors .

Find out  how to apply or consult our FAQ .

Deadline for applications: December 1.

Get to know our faculty

Check out our faculty profiles to learn more about the writers you could be working with!

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Graduate Writers Community

Writing your thesis or dissertation is hard work. join the community and make writing social., category archives: creative writing, being vulnerable in writing.

We live in a world, that, to put it mildly, is less than kind at times. As the days go by, we may well feel poked, prodded, or just, simply, wronged. I’m sure we can all relate, I mean it’s hard to go through a year, let alone a day, without something being irksome. With all these pains, worries and injustices, who wants to open themselves to others, to be vulnerable; it may be the last thing on your list of things to do. Yet, we know great things can come from being vulnerable—think of the journeys we make to foreign places, the personal conversations we find ourselves in, or, simply, the unexpected events that life throws to us; it’s not all bad. In fact, how would we grow as people, as individuals, as a community, without being vulnerable to something, someone, or the world at large (or, without some other thing being vulnerable to us?).

Vulnerable Life

In our world, being vulnerable is not only part of daily life, but also part of the practice of being a writer. Being vulnerable in life is as vital as it is in being able to write well; why then do we worry about opening up, about sharing our deepest thoughts and feelings when we witness not only the pain such experiences bring, but also the positivity. You are vulnerable, I am vulnerable, together it is inescapable.

Ours, however, is a society where vulnerability is wedded to a certain weakness . Gender stereotypes and general prejudice abound when considering the baggage that comes with being vulnerable. We don’t know our teacher but we know that, if you want success, or to be a leader, you have to toughen up and close the world off: just be ‘you’, a promethean character, we are told. This “fear of vulnerability” is a pathology, not just for us as social beings, but as writers; seriously, who likes writing that is closed to the world? Who is moved by writing that is ironclad, fortress-like, cold and closed?

Being Vulnerable and Using vulnerability

To feel the connection between vulnerability and authenticity is not novel, nor is noticing the power vulnerability has to move people and change yourself. What makes for moving stories, for moving writing, is vulnerability to your audience. Turning towards the need to be vulnerable in writing isn’t simply about being personal; it is about being open to the world as a wider life practice. While, usually, being vulnerable means we have to be ‘deep ’, it doesn’t have to be; maybe being vulnerable happens in small ways, with small steps rather than deep plunges. It is time to embody the vulnerability that makes your writing alive to the world and all that happens in it. We must start by asking ourselves, which writing is not vulnerable to us, as readers?

Critically, vulnerability isn’t just a useful rhetoric practice, a deployment of pathos: it is but a part of living. Here, Brené Brown , distinguishes ‘using’ vulnerability and ‘being’ vulnerable; as Jane Harkness says “there is a stark difference” . The point for us, the laypeople, is that being vulnerable in and with our writing is about opening a space for dialogue, a space where we can write, think and be together, where we can grow, and, as Haraway says, “ stay with the trouble ”.

Being Vulnerable with Others

But how can we learn to be vulnerable in and with our writing? Here are some steps we can take:

• Be honest and trusting (we aren’t escaping being vulnerable to the world any time soon, trust that others are there for you)
• Do writing exercises (small essays, little scribbles, anything that isn’t too serious) – share it with others; de-escalate the fear you have of the experience
• Visit writing centres, us included (engaging with professionals may help depersonalise the whole experience)

We are not immune to being vulnerable, we need vulnerability for our writing to be itself, even if we are not of a literary mindset. We need vulnerability to be willing to change ourselves, and our writing; we need vulnerability to be willing to listen to the comments, thoughts, and criticisms others have of what we say. So, whoever you are, remember that good writing isn’t closed and invulnerable; it is there to be open, ready to reveal itself to world. I’m ready to be open to the world, are you?

About the Author:

Hey, I’m Luke, a masters student in Political Science with a Concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria; I am working to work out what I am actually working on. I completed my undergraduate in the UK with a year abroad of study in Munich, Germany. Now, I find myself acting as the Teaching Assistant Consultant for Political Science, an International Teaching Consultant, and as a Graduate Student Tutor at the Centre for Academic Communication.

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Coming out of the cave: playing with reflexive writing.

By Luke Lavender

“How MUCH my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at

bottom!” – Kafka, Investigations of a Dog

Clack go the keys; your mouse moves across the screen, in a lazy manner, hovering over the text you have managed to write and pour out. Your brain is weary, your eyes are adjusting—right, let’s see what we have managed to put into the world. Oh, no, what I am I saying here, how does Trump relate to this, am I really claiming THAT!? Wait, is that it? How did I get here, what was I saying, where was my writing going—is there no going back, I want to find what I was meaning to say before I lose myself in this cave.

Lost, lost, lost; our writing is screaming to say something, but it’s lost, I am lost in my writing. These feelings abound, as an undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate, as someone who simply is trying to speak to others. I’m sure we’ve all been here before, in that dark cave where what you are saying does not connect to what you mean, where you, your words and speech, are not in dialogue with your thinking, your intention—how does it happen, does it always have to be this way, can I not be myself in my writing?

It is not uncommon that we are told to avoid you , the subject of you, the subject of personal subjects in writing.  As we ‘refine’ what we say, we find it common to try and escape ourselves in that process; we are told to write an argument, but make sure it is the argument that speaks, that you are not yourself in your text. In fact, in a certain way, is our writing not writing about avoiding that subject, the subject that we are? Sometimes, these lessons are personal and conscious—feedback asking us to not be so personal, to distance the writing from ourselves, to make sure that the writing speaks for itself —sadly, it is also an unconscious process; for many of us, writing operates through what Butler calls, in Excitable Speech, a “logic of censorship” that makes speaking, writing and dialogue, possible. Paradoxically, we are told to censor and write without ourselves, but why?

Formally the reasons abound, the father of them, is objectivity; “Academic writing should be objective… the language of academic writing should therefore be impersonal, and should not include personal pronouns, emotional language or informal speech” . For many this is all well and good, by eliminating use of the ‘I’ or yourself in the writing, we can escape bias, the tainted world of experience, and actually come into knowledge, true knowledge, knowledge that exists irrespective of a subject, a ‘ you’ , who does the thinking. Allegedly this leads to greater clarity, clearer reasoning, and more transparent writing; but does it? Is this all it does?

It seems sensible that objectivity removes us from what we say, so sensible that we miss the wider circle we find ourselves in: being objective requires being opaque to yourself in the writing, to not be reflective about what you think, let alone what you write. In this circle, we lose a grasp of the edges of our writing, it turns from being a cave into becoming a tomb; the writing becomes dark, you can’t find your way around it, let alone, get out of it—we find ourselves trapped into writing objectively and destined to find ourselves as mummified within hieroglyphics that we can’t even decipher. What a sad fate for objective knowledge, for objective writing, for an objective author; is this truly our destiny, can I not, myself, start understanding what I want to say? How, in a word, do we come to know the edges of ourselves, our writing, and what we are saying through writing itself? Should writing not be the means by which we not only illuminate our minds, but, fundamentally, learn about the thoughts that we have? Should writing not be about becoming aware of the thoughts we have and how to express them?

What could be a more perfect recipe for getting lost than the reflex to not be you in your writing, to write without yourself in the process? This is a concern that dogs the philosopher Raymond Geuss in the book “Philosophy and Real Politics”; the tendency of our philosophy, thinking, and, ultimately, writing is to lead us away from ourselves, to shut the doors on thinking about how your writing speaks to others, but also, reflects yourself. No wonder then, that, Mihaela Mihai calls for “responsible” and “responsive” theorising , a practice of being responsive to the realities of the world, and yourself in that world. Can we not take a stand and ask for a turn towards responsible and responsive writing? And what would it entail? A writing that, in its very existence, is reflexive, knows the edges of what it says, what it thinks, and what it thinks it says in contrast to what it actually says; a writing that is not entombed in objectivity, but open to itself. It is about making writing an exercise in reflection.

Are we not lost souls because we think our writing is transparent when it is actually opaque? Are we not in this cave because the way we are taught to write, academically, leads us away from being reflexive with what we say, and from knowing the limits of writing, from ourselves, on the page? So, as we turn to outside help, to others to help us say what we think and be transparent, perhaps we can try and recognise the vitality of being responsible and responsive as we write; in other words, of writing reflexively . This may happen in small steps, but perhaps we can collectively practice this lost language of ourselves in writing: journal, explore, and, above all, write about ourselves. We must play with our writing; so play, like I am in this very post, in this very writing. It doesn’t have to be objective, but it has to talk about you—give it a go with me, maybe we can find get out of the cave and find our paths together?

This first step—of turning writing into a reflexive exercise about reflecting on yourself, your thoughts, your limits—is exactly what we need if we want to know who we are and what we are saying when we put pen to paper, finger to key, and expose our writing-self to the world. So, let us not avoid the subject within writing, let us reflect on how to write reflexively. I for one, am tired of being lost in my own work.

A beam of light, a mirror, or an axe: Writing as self-discovery

By Emily Arvay

“The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards” (Atwood, 176).

Margaret Atwood and Hélène Cixous suggest that all writing is motivated by a compulsion to explore the deepest parts of ourselves. Both authors argue that writing serves to illuminate “an underworld” to draw unacknowledged or unexamined insights back into the light (Atwood, xxiv). Whereas Cixous compares writing to plunging deep into the earth or ocean (5), Atwood compares writing to entering a dark labyrinth or cave with no opening:

“Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one’s way forward but a feeling that there [is] a way forward, and that the act of going forward eventually [brings] about the conditions for vision.” (xxii-xxiii)

For Atwood, writing is midwifed in darkness through which inspiration appears as a flash of light (176). Simply put, writers who enter this underworld serve to illuminate that which is already present but unseen .

For Atwood and Cixous, the process of reading shares many of the same properties as writing: a reader enters a text from a place of darkness, unsure of where that text may take them, and temporarily loses then regains their sense of self in the process. As Cixous describes, to be a reader is “to lose a world and to discover that there is more than one world, and that the world isn’t what we think” (10). Ultimately, both authors acknowledge that writing-as-self-discovery is not an easy process – that any attempt to write with integrity is “an exercise that requires us to be stronger than ourselves” (Cixous, 42). It is perhaps for this reason that Kafka once compared writing to “an axe” to break “the frozen sea inside us” (as cited in Cixous, 17). Whether understood as a beam of light, a mirror, or an axe, Atwood, Cixous, and Kafka teach us that the process of writing, however imperfect, may gift the writer with the means to ascend towards a more luminous, expansive, or magnanimous awareness of self.

Works Referenced

Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cixous, Hélène.  Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

About the author:

Emily Arvay completed her PhD at the University of Victoria in 2019 with her thesis “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism.”  Since then, she has worked as a Learning Strategist and EAL Specialist at the University of Victoria. She is currently conducting further research on the intersections between literary metamodernism and contemporary climate fictions.

Jacquie plays: The literature review as a journey up the mountain

By Jacqueline Allan and Madeline Walker

Jacqueline Allan, a masters’ student in kinesiology with a background in recreation, started visiting the Centre for Academic Communication early in her program. When Jacquie , who is studying adult play, shared her novel approach to the literature review with us recently, I just had to see if she was willing to let the community experience it as well.  Click onto the sound file to hear Jacquie’s journey up the mountain.

• 2018 04 20 Play And Playfulness Literature Review Podcast Preview

Earlier in the semester, Jacquie and I had a conversation about her life and her work.

Madeline: “Thank you for providing your literature review recording for us to enjoy. Can you tell me a little about why you wanted to study adult play for your master’s thesis?”

Jacquie : “I teach a lot of fitness classes, and I noticed that when I present something that’s playful, there are people who really resist that. They think, ‘I’m here to get a good hard workout, let’s just stay with what we know about exercising. Let’s not do anything playful.’ In fact, I’ve had people leave the class. So, I’m interested in what happens when we want to become playful. Or, why don’t we become playful?”

Madeline: “I love your question, ‘why are people resistant to play?’ I can relate as I used to be one of those people. Part of it was self-consciousness. What would people think? We’re not children anymore, I can’t look foolish. That was part of my resistance.”

Jacquie: “I think that’s a lot of it. People say I was a kid then, and I’ve left all that behind. Why is that? What are the forces acting on us as adults that don’t allow that? Is it still the work ethic thing, that if I am not working, I’m not seen as being productive? So it doesn’t have value? I am interested in that.”

Madeline: “When I first heard your lit review, you were on a hike, and there was birdsong in the background—you were embodying this spirit of play in your work, which I think is so wonderful.  I wanted to know what was the spark to give you this idea?  Was it, ‘I want to do a lit review and I want to record it, to make it a story?’”

Jacqueline made a wry face. “You just said I wanted to do a lit review; I HAD to do a lit review!” We both laughed about that.

Jacquie then described a childhood memory that informed her literature review journey: “I thought back to when I was a kid. I grew up on the North Shore of Vancouver, and we lived at the bottom of Grouse Mountain, and that was one of the things I did with my cousins, who lived in the same neighbourhood. We used to go down to the creek at the bottom of the mountain, and we would start going up the mountain, looking for Santa Claus. That was the culture we grew up in. It occurred to me that we didn’t really know where we were going. We knew that we were having fun, and this lit review is a journey for me into the unknown, into the wilderness.”

Madeline: “So that’s where you got the model for the journey up the mountain? “

Jacquie: “Yes. So I took all the people I was looking at in my research, and I could envisage them being at certain places along the way. One person that comes to mind is Brian Sutton-Smith [play theorist from New Zealand, 1924-2015]. I read his material for the literature review, and at one point I thought—wait a minute—I’ve met this person before! There was a prof who came to UBC and gave us a lecture for a convention or something, and I walked back with him and we were laughing and he looked like a surfer, and he had an accent. He reminded me of somebody who embodied playfulness! I could see him in the forest. He was with all the elves, just running around in this grove. So he takes a big part in this because he, for me, having met him, was playful even in his work. . . . And toward the end of the lit review, I came to the realization that I didn’t know anything!

I responded, “That means you’re very wise, Jacquie, when you know you don’t know anything!”

We chuckled about that nugget of truth voiced by Albert Einstein: “the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

Jacquie: “Brian Sutton-Smith said that play is ambiguous–even Aristotle and Plato said that. We don’t really know what it is. Play is a noun and a verb in our culture. In particular, what is play for adults? As adults, we tend to know when we are not at play. To me, that means we know what play is. If you know the shadow of it, then you know what it is. But at the same time realizing this is so huge and I thought I would get to this literature review, and this would be the basis of a thesis I wanted to do, and I would think, ‘great, I’ve done it.’ Oh my gosh, no, not even close!”

The Wisdom of Ravens

Reflecting on her feeling of not knowing, Jacquie starts to describe her experience with ravens.

“I have met ravens on Grouse Mountain. One day, I was up there at the chalet where you can sit and look over the city. A raven came down and sat right there looking at me. This was the raven I had in my head. Speaking of wise–they’re so very wise.  The raven looked at me:

‘You think you know what’s going on but you don’t have a clue! And furthermore this path is way longer and way more ancient than you ever thought.’

Jacquie thought for a bit then added, “Ravens also symbolize the subtlety of the truth. Am I looking for the truth of play?  Will ever approach the truth? Or get close?”

Wondering with Jacquie, I offered the following thought: “Maybe there are multiple truths.”

Jacquie: “Good point. Ravens also symbolize the unknown. In fact, I wrestle with and have to get comfortable with and accept that I’ll never know the truth about play.”

I remembered what a favourite writer of mine said about the literature review. “Pat Thomson says that the literature review is about getting comfortable with ambiguity, with not knowing. You’ll never know it all. I love your attitude, of seeing it as a journey of revelation. Even if you only get a little bit of it, there’s still a sense of appreciation. Sometimes we get arrogant as academics, thinking we can capture all this information, but in fact it’s always changing and dynamic, and it’s impossible to know it all.”

Jacquie admitted that this was a surprise to her.

“Jacquie,” I said, “I know you are an accomplished jazz vocalist. Is that what you do for play?”

Jacquie: “It is playful, but within a massive structure. So knowing the structure is super important, and improvisation is all part of jazz. So that becomes the playful part but within this really tremendous structure. So for me personally, playfulness is an attitude. I have a strong feeling that all of creation is playful, and the fact that we as humans don’t get that is kind of our problem. And so I look for that, every single day, and I look for the people–you  recognize somebody who has a playful spirit. Most day to day situations can be turned into playful situations. But that makes going through it fun; why not have fun? We’re all in it together. To do what we do individually to the best of our abilities. Let’s just have fun together. It’s very social for me as well. I can be playful by myself, you know I like physical recreation, but being playful with other people is where it’s at.”

Madeline: “So playfulness is an attitude for you?”

Jacquie clarified: “It’s actually a behaviour trait. Most of the researchers would distinguish play as one thing, but playfulness is something different. One researcher, Gordon, says her feeling is that playfulness can be learned or re-learned as an adult, and that fascinates me. What are the conditions under which a person learns for the first time or relearns how to be playful in their life?”

Jacquie and I agreed this seemed hopeful—that adults can re-learn their playfulness.

Jacquie’s top three tips for writing a literature review

I asked Jacquie to share her top three tips for a student who says, “I have to do a lit review and I’m terrified! What should I do?”

Jacquie responded without missing a beat: “Seek help at the Centre for Academic Communication.  Those people know what a literature review is, and they can give you information on how to approach it right from the very beginning. They can give you tons of resources. That was so important to me. It was vital to me, not having done one before.”

Madeline: “Thanks for the plug, Jacquie!”

Jacquie : “Second, be looking at a topic you absolutely love because it can be onerous, and reading research is a bit of a process, so just stay with your loved topic. The third one is to have fun with it because it is a journey. In Travels with Charley , John Steinbeck says ‘you don’t take a journey, the journey takes you.’ So recognize that right off the top.”

Jacquie  started to gather her things to go. Time had slipped by quickly because we had been playing. “Thank you for the opportunity and the assistance you’ve given me.”

Thank you, Jacquie , for sharing your journey through this interview and your recorded literature review. Many readers will feel inspired to welcome playfulness into their lives after they read this. I know you inspired me!

Photo of Jacquie by Malakai Design Photography

Photo of Raven: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Female_adult_raven.jpg

By Bombtime [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Know thyself: A conversation with Dr. Lisa Mitchell about writing

By Madeline Walker with Lisa Mitchell

Last week, I wandered over to Cornett to visit Dr. Lisa Mitchell, Associate Professor and Graduate Student Adviser in the Department of Anthropology. We sat together in her cozy office on a cool March afternoon to talk about writing—a favourite topic for both of us.

I asked Lisa about her own graduate school experience—could she share any tips gleaned from writing her dissertation? Lisa admitted that she didn’t become as “deeply reflective about how to write and especially what to do if writing doesn’t go smoothly” until she had her own graduate students.  We agreed that we often learn best by teaching. Lisa’s experience supervising graduate students exposed her both to students who experienced writing as pleasurable and to students who experienced writing as terrifying, and this helped her to a realization.  “I needed to get more reflective about my own writing practice and what I might offer to them to work through problems or how to take the writing to a deeper level.” Here Lisa touched on a theme she returned to several times during our dialogue: self-reflection in writing. As we become aware of our writing process, we come to know and accept ourselves as writers, and therefore we become more effective at writing, making the most of our idiosyncratic methods.

Garnered from both her own writing experience and her experience supervising, Lisa shared some of the ways she guides graduate students when they run into writing trouble. “Don’t assume that writing is easy and don’t assume it’s something natural. Take it as an  aspect of your learning process. It’s a skill and needs to be practiced. Do it regularly so it becomes a habit and something you think about through that regular engagement.”

Lisa noted that in anthropology, writing is sometimes the site or space for analysis, and students may get stuck in their writing because they are “still in the process of figuring out the analysis and trying to sort it out.”  She went on to describe several ways to overcome barriers that arise when we try to think things through before writing them down.  “When I start a piece, it’s not unusual for me to have a very hazy, broad idea of what I’m talking about, but when I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, I am working out the analysis as much as I am working out the narrative structure.” Lisa paused thoughtfully. “When things don’t go well, when you start to stumble in writing, change it up a little bit. Pick a different topic for even a few minutes or a day or two. If you’ve been sitting with your computer, stop and try pen and paper. In some of my classes, I have a session where you get a sentence fragment to start and you have to keep writing for five minutes.  Just do freewriting. Unleash the initial apprehension about starting a writing session.”

Lisa also finds that using visual tools can help shift stuck writing.  “I rely very heavily on making diagrams with my students when working through not just writing but analysis. I need to move between the word, the mind map, and the flow chart, and sometimes it is enormously helpful to sit and talk about what you are trying to write and try to represent it visually. So you have both a sense of the component elements of your writing, but also there is something very freeing, very stimulating in moving away from the word and putting it into circles and arrows.”

Another method Lisa uses when she needs to change things up is voice. “I turn on a recorder and just start talking. Sometimes it’s just me and my dogs and I’m going to start somewhere, sometimes in the middle or sometimes I think this is where I want this paper to end up. It’s a bit time consuming because you have to go back and see if there’s anything you really wanted and at times there is and at times there isn’t, but generally that process begins to bring to the surface bits and pieces that I know need to be in the piece I’m working on.”

Lisa then stressed the importance of sharing your writing: “We end up writing in little closed off spaces and there is much value in thinking about how you can make the writing more social. Talk to other people about writing – don’t assume that other people are writing without problems, without crisis.  Sometimes, talking to other people about what you are writing is a way to express it differently.”

This led Lisa to think about how she shares her own work with colleagues: “I think particularly among faculty we are unwilling to share our unfinished, our unpolished drafty drafts, and I think there is enormous value in working through even some of the basic foundational elements of an argument or the structure of a piece by being willing to open yourself up a bit.”  She elaborated on the metaphor of writing as conversation, a metaphor that can liberate us from the intimidating prospect of writing a thesis or dissertation:  “Think of writing as a creative process. If you load it up by saying ‘I have to write my dissertation,’ that’s such a daunting process, whereas if you say ‘I want to ask some interesting questions’ and ‘I want to engage in some conversations,’ it’s so much more doable, and it also feels like something that is much more like our everyday lives. Although there are certain requirements for a dissertation or a thesis in the level of academic language, and you are engaging sources in a way you wouldn’t ordinarily in everyday conversation, by metaphorically framing what you’re doing as engaging in a conversation and asking interesting questions, you don’t take on that huge burden: ‘Now I must create original knowledge’ in five or seven chapters or whatever.”

I agreed that the conversation metaphor is very useful in academic writing, mentioning a helpful writing text based on the idea of dialogue, They Say/ I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Graff and Birkenstein (2010).

As the clock crept closer to the end of our allotted time, I asked Lisa for any further thoughts on how she writes best, and she reiterated the importance of opening up about your writing:  “I sometimes think the reason we don’t talk about what we’re writing is there’s always a risk that we won’t finish it, so we don’t talk about it.” “Yes,” I said, “like telling people you’re quitting smoking then starting again.”  Lisa laughed. “The list of things we would like to write is always longer than the list of what we actually manage to write, but I don’t think there’s any real shame in that. Sometimes part of the creative process is working through the possibilities and then settling on the one or the two that you’re ready to actually write.  I tend to think of myself as a non-linear writer, so I really am one of those people that sometimes just starts in the middle. I kind of know where I should end up, but I’m not too sure where I’m starting from. I think by this point in my career I’ve made peace with that process; I don’t stress about it very much anymore and I’ve also made peace with the fact that sometimes I start articles or writing pieces that don’t get finished. Sometimes I lose interest, and other times I can’t figure out a way to tell the story that is compelling to others. It may be something I found deeply interesting, but I think why would other people care about this?”

I responded: “What I am taking away from what you have said, Lisa, is that self-reflection, self-knowledge about being a writer is extremely important. Once we know what kind of writer we are, we can make peace with that, work with it, instead of thinking we ought to be a certain way.” Lisa nodded in agreement. I left feeling validated—I am one of those “start in the messy middle” writers, and I was happy to know that others worked productively, even confidently, in this manner.  Thank you, Lisa, for sharing these ideas.  There’s no shame in being the writer you know you are. . . in fact, it’s cause for celebration. Writer, know thyself.

Lisa M. Mitchell is Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor in Anthropology at UVic. Her research interests are at the intersection of bodies, technology, and inequalities. She has conducted research on prenatal testing, perinatal loss and reproductive politics in Canada, on the visualizing technologies of medicine, especially ultrasound fetal imaging, on experiences and meanings of body and risk among impoverished children and their families in the Philippines and among street youth in Canada, and on bereaved parents’ use of social media.

Just do it: Enter our contest now!

Graduate  students:  tell your writing story.

For a chance to win a prize, enter our blog post contest about how the University of Victoria’s extraordinary environment matters to your writing .

Describe where you love to write, take a picture of yourself in that location, and share with us how the amazing environment at the University of Victoria and its environs inspire your writing.

Or, describe who helps you write: a writing group, counsellor, tutor, librarian, instructor, supervisor, or friend? Tell us how this relationship matters to you and your writing and include a photo of yourself and whoever makes UVic an extraordinary environment for you and your writing.

Submit your entries (blog post plus photo) to [email protected] by 11:59 p.m., February 28, 2018 for a chance to win one of three prizes:

• First prize: $100 gift certificate at UVic Bookstore
• Second and third prizes: $50 gift certificates at UVic Bookstore

Winning entries will be published on the Graduate Student Writers’ Community blog.

Please read the  Contest RULES

Hidden gems: A conversation about writing with Dr. Anne Bruce

By Madeline Walker

Late one Friday afternoon in January, I sat across from Anne in the Bibliocafé to talk about writing. The metal gates were being drawn around the food counter, and most seats were empty as students went off to their week-end activities.  In her role as the Associate Director of Graduate Education at UVic’s School of Nursing, Anne meets with many graduate students struggling with writing their theses and dissertations. The first thing I asked Anne was, “How can students be effective writers?”

Anne was quick to respond: “Write a lot. Engage in conversation with what you are reading—make notes, be in conversation with the author.” Anne recommended that students engage in note-taking at every stage of the dissertation.  Take notes during your coursework, your research, your data analysis.  “Very soon,” she said, “you will start to make connections.  The analytic process is fostered through organizing one’s thoughts through writing.”

Note-taking, Anne suggests, can also be in the form of a reflective journal , a vehicle that gives you “permission to be footloose and fancy free. Especially when doing research. You can include everything. Include whatever’s happening, the feeling of being blocked, the emotional experience of writing, the personal—everything—follow all lines of thought.”  Anne’s eyes lit up when she remembered how an entry she made in her reflective journal while on vacation led to musing about the verb “to vacate,” an observation that ended up in her dissertation.  “You never know what gems will come up,” Anne smiled.

This talk of gems got us onto the topic of voice: How do students find their own way of writing?  Anne suggested you be alert to writing that really engages you, writing that evokes a sense of aliveness. “Read to get a sense of what moves you,” she said. “If a writer really speaks to you, acknowledge that—take the writing apart—ask yourself, what is it about the style that is evocative? Don’t mimic the writing, but look at structure and style and make it your own.”

“Who do you like? Who moves you ?” I asked.  Anne didn’t skip a beat. “ Gary Rolfe writes with passion. I’ve found his voice clear and strong, the confidence.  He has an opinion,” she continued. “His writing borders on polemic, and my tendency is to be temperate, but polemic has its place,” she said with a wry grin.

“Anybody else?” I asked. “Sally Gadow, a poetic philosopher,” Anne replied.  “She gave me permission to write that way. And another writer is Patti Lather —she writes fractured text, visually ‘saying’ what she means.  For example, she embeds boxes in her work that disrupt the writing.”

Anne and I talked about how students can gain inspiration from writers they admire, how they can play with writing, not taking it too seriously.  She reminded me that just as an academic writer’s body of work changes over time, so does the writing of graduate students as they develop their own styles and voices.

We shifted to another topic.  What about writers who struggle with writing and self-expression?  Anne suggests that grad students do an honest self-assessment of their writing, and if they need to learn the basics, then they can set out to learn them. It’s never too late to figure out how to work with an outline, to practice using mind-maps, to learn how to signpost and summarize.  This was the perfect opportunity for me to point out that graduate students can make appointments with tutors at the Centre for Academic Communication to work on any aspect of their communication skills.

Fittingly, my last question for Anne was about finishing; how do students finish a long writing project when they feel stuck?  Her answer was that we need to “acknowledge and work with fear and resistance. It’s part of the process, inherent to a sense of identity. It feels vulnerable to write, but we must find a way to be with it.”

One of the reasons students get stuck is that they get paralyzed by feedback from supervisors and committee members.  Anne had this recommendation: “Try not to take feedback personally, learn from it, and know that you don’t have to accept it, especially comments about style or approach. You can differentiate what is helpful and leave the rest.”  Anne also cautioned about “seeking feedback too early. In writing’s formative stages, things are in process. It’s a messy incubation period, and if you seek feedback from your supervisor too soon, the work can become even messier. You may get advice you don’t want to follow, which complicates your relationships. Instead, find peers who might be helpful, trustworthy, and honest.”

The winter sky turned purple and orange beyond the quad: It was time to part ways.  Anne had to go meet some PhD students at the Grad House and my work day was over.  But before we left each other, Anne added a lovely parting gift: “I know that students, as they build confidence, will write themselves into their dissertations.”

Thank you for the wise and encouraging words, Anne.  May we all trust the writing process.

Dr. Anne Bruce has been with UVic since 2003. Her approaches to research and teaching invite students into (un)speakable and in-between spaces of our professional and personal lives. Her current scholarship includes understanding nurses’ experiences with medical assistance in dying and integrating contemplative approaches into teaching and learning. She believes education can inspire, transform, and generate life-long friendships.​

How writing fiction helped me write my dissertation

Somewhere in my academic career I started trying to write novels. It wasn’t a decision I can pinpoint. It crept up on me through multiple fronts: my sister working for the Greater Victoria Public Library; a past girlfriend who had a sister married to the brother of epic-fantasy author Brandon Sanderson; free lectures for writing fiction by Brandon Sanderson on YouTube; a past roommate on the autism spectrum whose life revolved around fiction; and many friends who dabble with the idea of writing stories. Combine all this with my unending curiosity, and the result is years of my dissertation developing in parallel with multiple creative writing projects.

Underneath the curiosity, I felt that if I could write a novel, then a dissertation would be that much easier because I would have full command of the written English language. I should point out that my research area is in the sciences. If I could find a way for my brain to run a marathon, creative writing seemed like a healthy exercise.

As the years marched on, and my commitment to learn the craft of storytelling grew more earnest, I came to the realization that most authors spend at least four dedicated years in a degree program writing essays to refine their skills—which I don’t have—so there’s probably still a long way for me to go here. Upgrade my efforts to an ultra-marathon after bench pressing 500 lbs. Probably not healthy.

So I can save you the troubles I’ve been through and point you in the right direction if, like me, you also want to push your brain to its limits. If you are in the sciences, my suggestions are overkill, but still have benefits, and if you are not, then they might just be a nice addition to your skill set. Perhaps you want to write novels. In my present case, a wonderful surprise turned out to be how much easier it is to write documents of any kind, especially career oriented ones such as cover letters and teaching statements. It also made getting feedback from my supervisor much more tolerable.

The best piece of advice I can give is to make writing a part of every day. The easiest way to do this is to combine it with whatever entertainment you consume. Take notes on the shows you watch. I use Google Drive for this and all my other notes on writing. Most shows out there have commentary by YouTube podcasts and I look for those that grow my vocabulary.

There’s no shortage of videos online and books you can get on becoming an author. I found many of them to be repetitive. However, sadly, much of the advice is not helpful, and I have been fortunate to find the few sources that can actually prove it with science. A great place to start learning how to write fiction properly, no matter what your skill level, is a book called Story Genius , by Lisa Cron. She debunks the useless advice, and gives you a plan that avoids the big editing mistakes that waste time.

I’ve spent a lot of my education using formal logic, so I was delighted to see that writing approached from the perspective of journalism makes heavy use of logic. Finding topics is a matter of exploring logical patterns in everything you observe and proving their existence. Trying to refine this skill has helped me in my research, since this is creativity in a nutshell. This process is explained robustly in A Writer’s Coach , by Jack R. Hart.

Actually, I do have course credits with a superb textbook for grammar, and I still reference it often: Understanding English Grammar , by Martha Kolln and Robert Funk. I consider this the resource for word and sentence-level expertise only. Beyond this, if you want to know the impression your writing leaves, then Writing Tools, by Roy Peter Clark brings a large set of available skills. If you need advice at the story level, a freelance editor named Ellen Brock on YouTube provides not only videos, but organizes a novel boot camp on occasion. On her blog , she gives feedback on story submissions, and I find this is a good gauge to compare myself with other wannabe authors.

Creative writing course lectures for Brandon Sanderson’s BYU class are on YouTube. There are multiple iterations of it, each on different channels, but the most recent one for winter 2016 on Camera Panda really is the best one to watch, both in terms of video quality and content. Ignore the advice on the spectrum between plotting a novel or free-writing one. There’s no way around planning your writing if you don’t want to throw away much of what you write and you want an effective outcome.

Russell Campbell is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and has completed a Master of Science in discrete mathematics, both at the University of Victoria, as well as a Bachelor of Science in mathematics at the University of the Fraser Valley.

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Apr. 22, 2024

Empowering voices: the future of creative writing at rice university.

Creative writing transcends conventional academic boundaries, serving as both a discipline and a practice that invites diverse perspectives and influences. According to Ian Schimmel, associate teaching professor of English at Rice University, creative writing is characterized by its openness to exploration and expression.

“It does not define the scope of what a thought project should be,” Schimmel said, adding that creative writing encompasses a wide range of forms and styles, from traditional genres like fiction, poetry, nonfiction and drama to emerging mediums that shape contemporary discourse. “It’s very permeable to other parts of the university that want to participate in it.”

Extending beyond mere poetic imagery or storytelling, creative writing delves into the depths of human experience, capturing the rhythm, themes and pauses that define individual narratives.

“We’re all an amalgamation of stories,” said Kiese Laymon, the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English. “The rigor of having to explore your imagination and memory with these tools we have is hard work. We try to make it enjoyable work, but it’s definitely hard work.”

Creative writing plays a pivotal role in understanding and interpreting societal narratives, Schimmel pointed out, highlighting the significance of studying hybrid forms that blend elements of journalism, memoir and personal reflection, reflecting the multifaceted nature of contemporary storytelling.

“I prefer the term ‘imaginative writing’ or ‘public writing,’” said Justin Cronin, writer-in-residence in English. “‘Creative writing’ pays less attention to the idea that this is a discipline. It really is a very particular kind of discipline that you need to learn to do.”

At its core, creative writing is about having something to say — a point of view or an urgency that compels expression.

“We are equipping students with the tools to say what they feel is most important and urgent,” Schimmel said. “That’s where the fulfillment comes from.”

For Cronin, teaching creative writing is a dynamic process of self-discovery and exploration.

“Anyone who teaches creative writing is teaching themselves, full stop,” Cronin said. “We are doing both all the time.”

He emphasized the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, drawing connections between literature, film and societal trends. Cronin’s spring 2024 course titled “The End of the World as We Know It: Writing (and Reading) Apocalypse” exemplifies this interdisciplinary approach, blending literary analysis with creative expression to explore existential themes.

“There is a lot to learn about craft, about how to make a good sentence, how essays really work, how stories or novels work,” Cronin said. “But then there are also the broader questions: Why do we do this? Where does it come from, and where does it go?”

‘It feels like home’

It’s worth reflecting on the latter question in relation to Rice’s creative writing program. Of the current faculty, Cronin has the longest institutional knowledge. He came to Rice in 2003, effectively doubling the program’s full-time faculty.

“It was just me teaching fiction and one poetry professor,” Cronin said. “That was creative writing in 2003.”

A couple of years later when he sold a partial manuscript of what evolved into his trilogy “The Passage,” Cronin stepped down from his full-time teaching role to focus on the series.

Schimmel later joined Rice during a two-year fellowship starting in 2011. After his first year, the two other creative writing faculty members retired.

“I was one of only one or two other people teaching creative writing at Rice in 2012,” Schimmel said.

Associate professor Amber Dermont joined the faculty followed by assistant professor Paul Otremba then Lacy Johnson in 2016, which is when Cronin returned to teach at Rice.

“We made a strategic plan that involved investing in creative writing, trying to make Rice the best undergraduate creative writing program in the country,” said Lacy Johnson, associate professor of creative writing and director of undergraduate studies in English. “We proposed hiring a few more writers so that we could continue to grow.”

And they did, adding Laymon, professor in the practice Andrea Bajani, assistant professor Bryan Washington and associate professor Tomás Q. Morín.

“When I saw the job posting at Rice, every writer I knew was applying for the job,” Morín said. “Every writer I knew wanted to work at Rice because it was a dream job.”

Morin said his desire to join the faculty only grew after visiting the campus during the interview process when he got to meet the people he’d be working with and the students he’d be teaching.

“I felt like this job could be my last stop in terms of my academic career,” Morín said. “This is a place where I could retire. Once I actually did start teaching here, all of that was affirmed. I don’t want to ever teach anywhere else again. This doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like home.”

“With Lacy Johnson, Ian Schimmel, Kiese Laymon, Bryan Washington, Tomás Morín, Amber Dermont, Andrea Bajani and Justin Cronin, Rice boasts some of the most significant writers in the United States,” said Kathleen Canning, dean of the School of Humanities, in sharing her assessment of the creative writing faculty she calls “amazing.”

“Spectacular” is the word Cronin choses to describe his colleagues.

“The amount of raw achievement in so many areas is unparalleled,” Cronin said, pointing to Laymon’s selection as a MacArthur Fellow and Johnson’s creation of the Houston Flood Museum. “We have short story writers, essayists, novelists, poets, screenwriters. We have it all.”

Laymon, who started teaching at Rice in January 2022, expressed that he’s been impressed by how dynamic and thoughtful his colleagues are.

“Our ability to work together is one of the reasons why the creative writing program is growing at such an incredible rate,” Laymon said.

"The learning and the doing"

The program’s not growing just in terms of faculty; the academic powerhouse has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of students, sparking a surge of interest that far exceeds available capacity. Most creative writing classes have waitlists at least 20 students deep, while the waitlists for intro workshops are closer to 75.

“I’ve never worked anywhere where there was such a tremendous curiosity, passion and interest in creative writing at the undergraduate level,” Morín said.

“The desire on the part of these students to use creativity to explore critically and intellectually, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Laymon said, adding that he believes the interest is connected to the strength of the faculty. “You don’t find creative writing programs with any sort of growth unless the students are being taught well.”

Laymon suggested the program’s success also lies in its ability to attract students from diverse disciplines, including computer science, biology and engineering.

“There is such a hunger on our campus to make things and to take what you learned in the classroom and apply it,” Schimmel said. “There’s often a gulf between the theoretical and the practical in an education setting. What’s powerful about creative writing, and the arts in general, is the connectivity between the learning and the doing.”

Faculty members say they appreciate the diverse perspectives and interdisciplinary collaborations that emerge from such a dynamic student body.

“There are so many different kinds of expertise for students to use Rice and Houston as a laboratory to think about the issues that are facing us today,” Johnson said. “Thinking about climate, about science, about community, about culture, where better than Houston to come to learn to write about those things?”

"Experimenting with words"

The creative writing program is a catalyst for that exploration and discovery, empowering students to engage with a myriad of topics and formats while honing their skills as storytellers.

For example, on the nonfiction side, Laymon’s spring 2024 course titled "Verses/Versus: Miseducation of Lauryn Hill v. good kid m.A.A.d. city (or 1998 vs. 2012)” allows students to reflect on how music influences their lives, whether through personal experiences or the albums discussed in class. “Nonfiction Nature Writing,” taught by Johnson, merges writing and environmental philosophy.

“We’re giving consideration to the ways that we think about and talk about the environment as well as practicing writing about our relationship to the environment,” Johnson said. “Students often come to that class from the sciences. I have a lot of students from environmental sciences, geology, physics, ecology and evolutionary biology.”

The class is a different application of science, Johnson added, explaining that it provides students an opportunity to apply and translate what they’ve learned in their other classes in creative ways.

Schimmel, meanwhile, teaches podcasting courses, challenging students to report on stories beyond the hedges of Rice. By interviewing real-life characters and crafting compelling narratives, students gain valuable storytelling skills while exploring the power of audio storytelling.

“We deconstruct the narrative structures of radio storytelling to understand how a large amount of material can be condensed into something that is manageable, enjoyable and informative for an audience,” Schimmel said.

Central to the creative writing experience at Rice is the workshop. Through peer critique and experimentation, students refine their writing and gain insights into audience engagement and narrative structure.

“A workshop environment helps you compare your intentions with the realities of your audience,” Schimmel said. “It pulls you out of yourself. It makes you conscious of how form and technique affect your reader’s desire to interact with your work.”

Laymon underscored the importance of experimentation in creative writing. By encouraging students to explore literary traditions and experiment with language, the program fosters a culture of innovation and self-expression.

“We all have these 26 letters. How do we create a story with them?” Laymon said. “We need young people out there experimenting with words and to be encouraged to do that.”

"A unique opportunity"

As Rice’s creative writing program has evolved, its faculty have remained dedicated to fostering a culture of creativity, expression and intellectual inquiry, shaping the next generation of writers and thinkers.

“One of our goals is to broaden the public’s understanding of what creative writing is and how it can serve as a public utility for all,” Schimmel said.

The next step for the program, according to Cronin, is to elevate from a strong program to a national leader in undergraduate creative writing education.

“We want to be the best undergraduate creative writing program in the country, which means students come to Rice specifically for that,” Cronin said. “We want to build the kind of program that people deliberately seek out. Students apply to a university for a thing, and we want to be that thing.”

Faculty members are exploring the possibility of establishing a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing, which reflects the program’s commitment to furthering its impact and engaging with a broader community of writers.

“There’s a lot of interest,” Johnson said. “We have a really unique opportunity at Rice to build something from scratch.”

“That feels incredibly exciting to me,” Morín said, explaining that the goal is to create a program that addresses the shortcomings of the traditional MFA model while offering a fresh and dynamic approach. “It gives me a lot of energy, because as a group, we can offer the kind of experience that a graduate student in creative writing can’t find anywhere else.”

For more information about Rice’s creative writing program, click here .

The Badger Herald

• UWPD investigation of Wednesday battery ongoing

UW Institute for Creative Writing Fellows present work with Wisconsin Book Festival

The Wisconsin Book Festival hosted the 2023-24 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows Wednesday evening, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing.

The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows are a group of writers who are provided resources and community while working on their first book of poetry and fiction, according to the UW Creative Writing website . Not only is UW’s environment intended to improve the fellows’ writing skills, but it also provides them opportunities to develop as instructors, the website says.

UW creative writing professor Amy Quan Barry introduced the presenters, touching on the institute’s history — beginning with its founding in 1986 — and how it has developed numerous authors of acclaim.

The 2023-24 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow Elijah Bean presented first, reading from several poems, many of which concern ideas of home and reflection on the past. Bean’s poems are linked to memories such as a cramped living room, lawnmowers, dogs and writing alongside someone close to death and aware of their own mortality.

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Following Bean was 2023-24 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow Gothataone Moeng, who read an excerpt from the middle of the first chapter of her upcoming novel. Moeng’s work centered deeply around the meaning of human conversation and explored themes such as why people are drawn to certain others, becoming less ignorant of the world and the idea of possessing a great gift.

The 2023-24 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow Sadia Hassan presented next, with works heavily focused on the utilization of art as advocacy, and how poems can be written to represent one’s beliefs. The poems Hassan read involved themes such as dreaming, speaking out amongst a crowd and how to best confront the self-obsession that so heavily impacts American society.

Next was Ada Zhang, the 2023-24 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow, who read from a larger project in progress. Zhang’s work, which revolved around the life of a Chinese congregation moving into Texas and its subsequent role as a safe haven for immigrants, concerned the themes of religion, familial history and matching one’s identity with their family.

Lastly, 2023-24 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow in Poetry Mandy Moe Pwint Tu read from two poems and an excerpt from her novel’s prologue. All three concerned the international student experience, from feeling like an outsider to managing the familial struggle across oceans.

All five of the Creative Writing Fellows showcased their unique styles of writing that earned their positions and will continue to develop their work in Wisconsin and beyond.

• creative writing
• wisconsin book festival
• Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows

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2024 Braly Creative Writing Awards

Award for fiction: “poppy” by lukas pitkevits.

Lukas Pitkevits is a senior at UMBC, currently studying for a degree in Biological Sciences. Although he is pursuing a career in the STEM field, he is passionate about creative expression through storytelling, which he believes can be just as enlightening as any form of science. When he isn’t writing, he can be found curating playlists, watching ocean documentaries, or flipping through various art books. You can read his work here.

Award for poetry: “coffee can” by layanne khaskia.

Layanne is a Palestinian-American and Muslim writer, poet, and biochemistry student. She first became entranced by the world of poetry at age 17 and hasn’t put her pen down since. Her work centers themes of Palestinian culture and life from the perspective of a young woman growing up estranged from her ancestral land. You can read her work here.

Award for creative nonfiction: “flesh and blood” by erica rigoroso.

Hailing from a mysterious town in Southern Maryland, Erica Rigoroso is a senior studying English Literature and Communications and Technology. She finds comfort in writing about her personal experiences, aiming to make sense of all that has come her way. Aside from writing, Erica likes to listen to Blondie on repeat, watch strange movies, and most importantly—spend time with her cat, Karl. You can read her work here.

Posted: April 24, 2024, 7:53 PM

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Lukacs as literary critic, (april 1969).

From International Socialism (1st series), No. 36 , April/May 1969, pp. 36–38. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) .

‘But reality can be seized and penetrated only as a totality, and only a subject which itself is a totality is capable of this penetration ...’ [1]

The publication of Goethe and his Age [2] is a welcome addition to the works of Georg Lukacs available in English. [3] If Marxism is to offer an acceptable world-view to a new generation, the need for works of theory to embrace fields such as literature is very great, and Lukacs’ work can help to break down the deep parochialism of the British Left. [4] At the same time Lukacs’ literary writings contain many weaknesses associated with his political acceptance of Stalinism. There are signs that the bourgeois opponents of Marxism in the cultural field are giving up shadow-boxing with Zhdanov in favour of an attack on Lukacs. This short essay does not attempt a full account of Lukacs’ literary writings, but merely suggests some of their more apparent strengths and weaknesses.

Literature, along with philosophy, was Lukacs’ major interest in his early years in Budapest and Berlin. The First World War and the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 obtruded themselves forcibly into his academic world, and throughout the twenties, when his most notable work in philosophy and political theory was written, he seems to have abandoned literary criticism in favour of direct political involvement in the controversies of the Third International. Only after he had repudiated his earlier work and begun his long sojourn in Moscow did he turn back to literary criticism.

Lukacs’ capitulation to Stalinism cannot be interpreted in terms of cowardice or careerism. Rather it represents a response to the downward turn in the international revolutionary movement. Unwilling to take the desperate gamble of the Left Opposition, and horrified by the impact of fascism on the German culture he loved, Luckacs could see not alternative to Stalinism. One can see parallels not only with many of the old Bolsheviks, but with such writers as Ilya Ehrenburg. Marxism itself is not exempt from the historical pressures it seeks to study. In periods of working-class advance we find the emphasis on human action which characterises Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness (1923); in periods of defeat, it is replaced by a mechanistic determinism which offers the long-term consolation that ‘history is on our side’. That Lukacs’ work is sensitive to such pressures is suggested by his support in 1956 for the Nagy Government – if not for the Hugarian working class.

In a sense, then, literature offered Lukacs a retreat from action, an alternative to the political defence of Stalinism. At the same time, his choice of the essay form in most of his literary writings has a deeper significance. In his first major work, The Soul and the Form (1911), Lukacs wrote an essay on the essay form, arguing that the essayist stood midway between the poet and the philosopher. The poet deals only with things, which are unproblematic; the philosopher with ideas and the solution of problems. The essayist, while being concerned with general problems, cannot provide solutions, and approaches the general only by way of the specific, frequently taking works of literature as his starting point. For Lukacs under Stalinism, the ambiguous form of the critical essay allowed him to pursue, in an oblique form, the problems that run through his earlier work. In History and Class Consciousness Lukacs wrote:

‘The category of totality, the domination, determining and in all fields, of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which Marx took from Hegel.’ [5]

He shows [6] that the achievement of such totality demands the transcendence of individualism. The individual – whether isolated capitalist or fragmented worker – sees the social world as subject to a destiny beyond his control. Action is possible only if he accepts the laws of society as ‘natural laws’, or if he retreats into a purely ethical position. The working class, organised in the form corresponding to its consciousness – the Party – is able to overcome the false dichotomies of bourgeois thought: individual and society, ethics and science, theory and practice, etc. [7]

This theme of totality is a crucial problem for working-class consciousness and organisation, for developing the ability to ‘perceive oneself and the instant of one’s action as a moment of the totality, of the process, to see “defeat” as a necessary stage towards victory.’ [8] But it all raises a central question for the study of literature.

Vulgar Marxism and the bourgeois tradition in the sociology of literature have converged in taking a one-sided point of view. They have attempted to situate works of literature within a social-historical totality, but they have neglected to study the way in which a writer creates a totality within the work. Just as a political organisation is not merely the product of historical conditions, but seeks actively to. change those conditions, so a writer is not merely the product of his age, but seeks, actively to comprehend it. A dialectical study of Shakespeare would not content itself by remarking that his plays centre around a class struggle of nobility versus bourgeoisie, but demonstrate how the dramatic form concentrates and concretises this struggle in a way quite different from a work of history or economics.

Hence the concern with literary form that marks all of Lukacs’ writings. The earliest treatments of this theme go back to his Hegelian phase before the First World War – The Soul and the Form (1911), and The Theory of the Novel [9] The latter work is made unnecessarily obscure by its abstract and at times curiously lyrical style, but it makes a significant advance in the exploration of the theme of totality. Under Hegelian influence, Lukacs relates literary forms to historical epochs. He contrasts the modern age with what he calls the ‘closed civilisations’ of Greece and mediaeval Christianity, a world less rich than our own, but less problematic because of the overriding sense of totality. To this age belongs the epic. With the collapse of this closed civilisation the novel appears – a form for which Lukacs attempts the following explanation:

‘The novel is the epic of a time when the extensive totality of life is no longer immediately given, of a time for which the immanence of meaning to life has become a problem, but which, nonetheless, has not ceased to aim at totality.’ [10]

There is no attempt to connect this disintegration of totality in consciousness with the specific social and economic forms of capitalism, but an important step towards a dialectical concept of totality in class consciousness has been taken. When Lukacs returned to the problem of totality in the novel with The Historical Novel (1937), he had gone through a complex destiny of revolution in Budapest and counter-revolution in Moscow, and it is necessary to separate the strands in his work with care. The final section, a crude eulogy of third-rate novelists prepared to appear on anti-fascist platforms, and complete with a reference to Trotskyist nuisances’ [11] , is a Popular Front period piece. But the earlier section on the nineteenth century historical novel is a masterly analysis of literary totality. Lukacs shows how the historical novel is born from an awareness of his historical change produced by the French Revolution; and how, as a form, it represents an attempt at a methodological coming-to-terms with historical change. The most important distinction is that between the drama and the novel; the drama represents a ‘totality of movement’ – a closed system with complete economy of detail, while the novel represents ‘totality of objects’, a rendering of circumstances in all their richness. Thus he compares the treatment of the family in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks : in Shakespeare the ‘extreme and ... typical movements form a completely closed system’, while in Mann we see the ‘breadth and abundance of the real circumstances of family life ...’ [12] Scott, the great historical novelist, inspired Balzac, whom Marx and Lukacs agree in seeing as one of the greatest realist novelists of all time. The concept of totality is central to Lukacs’ theory of literary realism and the distinction he makes between realism and naturalism. In History and Class Consciousness he had argued that the whole is not the sum of the parts, but rather determines the parts. Therefore realism will not be achieved by the accumulation of factual details, but by the creation of coherent significant structures which give a place and a meaning to every detail. Naturalism, on the other hand, leads to the very opposite – the tendency in modem art to collage the sticking together of isolated observed details in haphazard juxtaposition. This is not totality, but on the contrary, the admission of failure in any attempt to create a meaningful totality. [13]

The concept of totality is also central to another theme in Lukacs’ work, the much more ambiguous one of humanism. The major essay in History and Class Consciousness , called Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat shows how capitalist production destroys man as a totality.

‘The process of labour is fragmented, in an ever increasing proportion, into abstractly rational partial operations, and this disrupts the relations of the worker to the product as a totality, and reduces his labour to a special function repeating itself mechanically.’ [14]

Such fragmentation in production necessarily leads to false dichotomies, such as reason versus feeling. In the work on Goethe and his Age Lukacs vigorously attacks the traditional views of literary history and the distortions of fascist intellectuals who seek to impose such false dichotomies on the history of German culture. The great age of humanism, which had realised in theory if not in practice the ‘unified and comprehensive development of the human personality’, was the Enlightenment. Lukacs demolishes the myth that Germany never had an Enlightenment (which would make it especially prone to fascism), and shows that despite certain reactionary sentiments on a purely political level, Goethe himself represents the culmination of the Enlightenment. But this very humanism, at times so powerful and healthy, and at times so abstract and pernicious, is a key to the great weakness of Lukacs’ work. In discussing the relation of the literary representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie to the class itself, Marx says:

‘According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life’. [15]

Similarly Lukacs, in character totally alien to the narrow-minded thugs who held power in the Kremlin, is nonetheless a literary representative of the Soviet bureaucracy. Because of this, Lukacs is unable to see that the analysis he himself applied to the French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, that of a ruling class validating itself in the name of revolution, is equally applicable to the Stalinist ruling class. If he criticises this class, it can be only in the name of individual humanism, not from the standpoint of a class. Similarly, he cannot go beyond the point of view of the Communist Parties in the West, who derive their legitimacy from the Russian Revolution, and cannot therefore adapt to changed circumstances, such as the greater weight and sophistication of the working class. In short, for Lukacs history stops dead in 1917; a lucid analysis of political and literary events before then, but only a distorting parody of what came after.

For the modern world, Lukacs recognises two forms of realism, critical realism and socialist realism. The theory of critical realism depends on the belief that the bourgeois intellectual still has a positive role to play. The cult of peaceful coexistence actually led Lukacs to write in 1955:

The real dilemma of our age is not the opposition between capitalism and socialism, but the opposition between peace and war. The first duty of the bourgeois intellectual has become the rejection of an all-pervading fatalistic angst , implying a rescue operation for humanity rather than any breakthrough to Socialism’. [16]

Against this perspective, he sees as politically the most important task the building of a Peace Movement in which all ideological tendencies merge, and artistically the continuation of the great tradition of the nineteenth century liberal novel. The hero of this phase is Thomas Mann, compared to Goethe for his concern with the ‘totality of human relationships’. [17] Mann, with his development from a purely unpolitical stance to his courageous opposition to Hitler, fits the Popular Front paradigm perfectly. All that critical realism need do is to show ‘readiness to respect the perspective of socialism’. [18] The active presentation of the working class is unnecessary.

The concept of ‘socialist realism’ is a more sensitive one for Lukacs than it was for Zhdanov. Nonetheless, it implies the same basic conservatism. At worst, it is the realism of the accepted fact, the glorification of what is at the expense of what might be. At best it involves a critique of abuses in terms of individualist, and thus ethical, humanism. In the essay Solzhenitsyn and the New Realism [19] , Lukacs attacks the art of the Stalin era as naturalism, not realism. But his praise is reserved for the portrayal of ‘a being whose humanity nothing could destroy or disfigure’, and he sees Solzhenitsyn’s work as being ‘a symbolic whole, with a meaning for all humanity’, in which ‘the origins of this bureaucracy and the groupings within it ... remain outside the bounds of the narrative’. [20]

Thus neither critical nor socialist realism goes beyond the limits of liberal humanism. What Lukacs leaves out of his picture is the writer who is revolutionary both in his conscious acceptance of Marxism, and in his treatment of literary form, who tries to write from the standpoint of the working class and its new modes of struggle, and develop new forms to fit the content. Yet such writers do exist – Sartre, Brecht and Breton, to name of three highly diverse cases – though most of them are an embarrassment of official Communism. In a controversy of the early twenties Trotsky argued against any idea of a specifically proletarian culture. [21] But Trotsky, the eternal optimist, did not foresee that fifty years after 1917 workers would be excluded from power in every country on earth. Lukacs in his very salutary concern for totality tends to concentrate on those writers who achieve complete totality within their work, in a harmonious construction rather than those who strive towards totality while engaged in struggle.

As a result, the formal potentialities of modern literature are underemphasised. And this is not merely the case when he is a hack supporter of censorship, as in his statement that Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus in the ‘fullest artistic and intellectual confirmation’ of the decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on modern music. [22]

More serious is his treatment of Brecht. Here he argues that ‘Brecht’s political didacticism, his attempt to impose intellectual schemata on the spectator turned his character into mere spokesmen.’ However Brecht developed in a later stage to the portrayal of ‘a complex dialectic of good and evil. Problems of society have become problems of humanity, subsuming the inner conflict and contradictions of the warring parties.’ [23] To assert that the only way to avoid didacticism is by retreating from politics to ethics is to avoid the very central problem of all Brecht’s work – and incidentally to stand History and Class Consciousness on its head. Similarly he argues that Surrealism has a positive aspect, as a stage in the evolution of Eluard and Aragon into socialist writers. But a greater poet than either of these, André Breton, remained a Surrealist while being a life-long revolutionary (albeit a Trotskyist). He is not mentioned. [24] Thus the problem of revolutionary art is again evaded.

In reading Lukacs it is important to criticise radically the heritage of Stalinism. Nonetheless, his concern with totality in form and content, and his humanism, when it is historical, and not abstract and ethical, will help lay the bases for a more wholly revolutionary literary criticism. Bob Dylan has lamented ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’. If only it were possible that the younger Lukacs might write a critique of the reified consciousness of his older self.

1. Histoire et Conscience de Classe , Paris 1960, p. 60.

2. Merlin, 36s.

3. Also available are Studies in European Realism , Essays on Thomas Mann , The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , The Historical Novel . Our gratitude to Merlin Press for publishing all but the first named may be tempered bv regret at the continuing absence in English translation of any major work written before Lukacs’ act of ‘self-critism’ in 1925.

4. As an example one may quote one of the best recent examples of literary criticism written by a committed socialist. Raymond Williams’ Modem Tragedy (Chatto & Windus, 1966), written in 1964. This contains one passing reference to the work of Lukacs, in which Williams comments that he appears to be more a post-Hegelian than a Marxist, without giving any indication as to which period of Lukacs’ work he is referring to. The work of the Lukacsian Lucien Goldmann on the ‘tragic vision’ is never mentioned. To regret this parochialism is in no way to endorse the thesis argued by Perry Anderson that in order to be a Marxist it is necessary to be foreign – or at least Irish.

5. Histoire et Conscience de Classe , p. 47.

6. In the essay Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist , Ibid. , pp. 47–66.

7. For a full treatment of this theme cf. Lucien Goldmann, Is There a Marxist Sociology ( IS 34 ).

8. Histoire et Conscience de Classe , p. 65.

9. Written 1914, published in 1920. Available in French translation, La Theorie du Roman , Gonthier, 1963

10. Ibid. , p. 48.

11. The Historical Novel , p. 256. In the French translation (Payot, 1965, p. 301). Trotskyists are not merely ‘nuisances’, but ‘vermin’

12. The Historical Novel , pp. 92–95.

13. It is arguable that Lukacs, like Engels, seriously underestimates Zola in this connection, for Zola unlike his mediocre imitators, does produce a meaningful intertwining of individual and social destiny in his best novels

14. Histoire et Conscience de Classe , p. 115.

15. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Marx and Engels, Selected Works , Moscow 1958, 1, p. 275.

16. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , p. 92.

17. Essays on Thomas Mann , p. 50.

18. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , p. 93.

19. The Socialist Register , 1965

20. Ibid. , pp. 208, 206, 210

21. Literature and Revolution , chapter VI.

22. Essays on Thomas Mann , p. 71.

23. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , pp. 87–88.

24. Ibid. , p. 104.

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A method for the study of written speech

• Published: March 1966
• Volume 61 , pages 335–337, ( 1966 )

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Literature Cited

E. V. Gur'yanov and M. K. Sherbak, Psychology and Method of Learning to Write, Moscow (1952).

A.P. Luriya, Higher Cortical Functions in Man and Disturbances Caused by Local Cerebral Affections. Moscow (1962).

V. V. Tomilin, Physiology, Pathology, and Forensic Aspects of Writing. Moscow (1963).

L. D. Harmon, Electronics, No. 34 (1962), p. 14.

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Baevskii, R.M. A method for the study of written speech. Bull Exp Biol Med 61 , 335–337 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00783701

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Received : 16 September 1964

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