‘Creating Criticism’, a John Fell-funded project led by Professor Joe Moshenska at the University of Oxford, seeks to create an international network of scholars engaged in work which blurs and reconfigures the boundaries between the creative and the critical. It emerges out of a recognition – shared, and increasingly urgent – that scholars of literature need to evolve and experiment if our discipline is to thrive and survive. While some responses to this “crisis” of literary studies have involved developing new theoretical models for reading, or producing manifestos for why literature matters, others have begun to think about new ways of writing: a turn towards ‘creative criticism’.
As yet, however, creative-critical scholarship remains piecemeal and inchoate: despite an explosion of experimental publications, and of university-level classes which teach the ‘possibilities of criticism’ or ‘autocriticism’, there have been relatively few attempts to bring together these disparate voices dedicated to the project of rethinking the creative-critical divide. ‘Creating Criticism’ thus aims both to intervene in the field of creative criticism and to rethink its de facto separation from other modes of literary study.
The project began with an Oxford-based symposium, ‘Creating Renaissance Criticism’, co-organised with Leah Whittington (Harvard), and now hosts a series of ‘Workshops in Experimental Criticism’. Tangentially to the John-Fell funded project, Joe also collaborates with Hannah Crawforth (KCL) to run an English Association Hub, thinking through creative criticism’s potential role in pedagogical practice.
'Creating Criticism' is assisted by Iris Pearson, a DPhil student at the University of Oxford.
