UNCORRECTED PROOFIntegrated Writing Programmes inAmerican Universities: Whither CreativeWriting?Peter VandenbergDepartment of English, DePaul University, McGaw Hall, 802 W BeldenAvenue, Chicago, IL 60614, USAOver the last decade, American scholars have produced books, essay collections andarticles utilising the disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric and composition to producecreative writing pedagogies. Such theorising, for example, refigures belletristiccomposition as a social, rather than personal enterprise and critiques and displacesthe writing workshop, the workhorse of conventional creative-writing pedagogy,with more collaborative approaches. This article argues that despite the growth ofthis scholarly field, the discourse has had no significant impact on the teaching orstaffing of creative writing courses in American universities; the deconstruction ofthe creative writing/composition binary remains a largely theoretical rather thanpractical matter. The author shows that this new discourse mostly fails to address, letalone reconcile, underlying materialstructural issues that continue to dividecomposition and creative writing in most institutional settings: the radicallydifferent approaches to training MFAs versus PhDs; differing standards for market-able expertise defined by most hiring institutions (‘creative’ versus ‘scholarly’publications); and bifurcated expectations for promotion and tenure. Perhaps mostimportant, this discourse ignores the fierce desire for independence from scholarlycommunity that ironically binds many who teach creative writing.The evolution of rhetoric and composition  the scholarly apparatus that grewup around the teaching of first-year composition in the American university has been animated by the consistent push and pull of competing impulses:(1) the desire to claim new intellectual territory, typically grounded in anexpansive definition of rhetoric and intended to subordinate multiplediscursive domains under a master umbrella; and (2) the tendency to separateinto smaller, specialised camps with more clearly defined objects of study. Theformer impulse is largely a theoretical matter, made possible by theremarkably free space of scholarly publication, the academic equivalent ofthe computer game, SimCity. The latter tendency, to separate, is the perhapsinevitable result of the material demands of location, administration, training,ambition and reward.As those pursuing scholarly achievement in rhetoric and composition havebeen propelled further from the first-year classroom by the discipline’semergent discourse, they have rubbed up against critical theories of all sorts,philosophy of the mind, social-science heuristics, and empirical observationand design. Where compositionists have found rich and productive bodiesof scholarship already erected to explain and influence practical activities,they have mostly borrowed for the purpose of enriching their own field.1479-0726/04/01 001-8 $20.00/0 – 2004 P. VandenbergINT. J. FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING Vol. 1, No. 1, 20041Y:/Multilingual Matters/NW/articles/NW033/nw033.3d[x] Thursday, 4th November 2004 15:20:29UNCORRECTED PROOF(Despite the deepest desires of rhetoric and composition scholars, it can beargued that the field’s scholarship has had no significant impact on work inother fields, even those with whom they share an institutional home.) Wherecompositionists have found activities or practices unilluminated by significantscholarly activity, they have tended to set up shop in an effort to interpret andinform. Such has been the case with technical writing, writing centres, writingin the workplace and, most recently, creative writing.The propensity to claim and explain has been greatest where there has beena vacuum, an absence of theory or reflection to account for an object orpractice.1Creative writing, an institutional space that, owing to the benignneglect of literary studies and its own historical movement away from ascholarly discourse, has been ripe territory for annexation.Dividing ‘Writing’As a product of the progressive education movement, creative writing inAmerica began in the early 20th century not as formation for the production ofliterary writers and certainly not as a locus for the production of scholarship,but rather as a ‘concrete representation of an idea about the best way to teachliterature’ (Myers, 1996: 12). Creative writing was initially designed tocultivate literary comprehension through mimicry  the notion that, for exam-ple, writing a sonnet will lead to a deeper understanding of and appreciationfor sonnets. For the first 50 years of creative writing’s history, according toD.G. Myers, creative writing was taught by literary scholars rather thanpracticing writers of fiction and poetry. The same sort of division betweenmaster and novitiate that sublimated composition to literature in the pre-warperiod suppressed the possibility that creative writing might be an epistemicactivity or an object of study.The period immediately after the second world war, a time of rapidexpansion in the American university, offered the strongest possibility forlinking creative writing with knowledge production, but a number of factorsconspired to isolate creative writing. The roots of contemporary creativewriting’s separation from disciplinary activity can be traced to yearsimmediately after the war, the heyday of the New Criticism. Myers accountsfor the profound influence of the New Criticism on the writer teachers whowere spawned by the Iowa programme and went on to institute creativewriting programmes across the country. The New Criticism, however, byinsisting that meaning was a product of close reading, an intensely individualencounter with a text, effectively cut students off from scholarly discourse byconsolidating expertise in the virtuosity of the critic. The pedagogicalapproach that remains common in creative writing today  learning by obser-vation  began in the isolation from scholarship fostered by the New Criticism.Creative writing teachers modelled close reading strategies, often on their ownwriting, and encouraged students to perfect the practice on their own work. Sodominant did this pedagogy become that by the mid-1970s, students in manyMFA programmes could finish their degrees solely through completion ofworkshops and seminars that required no secondary reading materials at all(Myers, 1996: 162 163).2International