Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide

Including pieces by creative critics as varied as Anne Carson, Jacques Derrida, Geoff Dyer, Hélène Cixous, Ali Smith, and John Cage, this anthology and guide celebrates the formal and intellectual inventiveness of works which also demonstrate a deep fidelity to the writing or art they address. The Anthology is of interest to all students, teachers and critics of literature and creative writing, and especially those students who are required to write critical essays. All 14 texts included respond innovatively to the question: How do we write criticism? As examples of academic critical writing they are all sympathetic to works whose aim is to change the ways in which we see and describe our world.

Key Features• Unique as an anthology of and guide to creative critical writing• Demonstrates a range of ways to write critically and creatively • Extensive introduction & explanatory headnotes to each text

Contents Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments; John Cage, from ‘Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?’; Anne Carson, ‘Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’; Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off’; Jacques Derrida ‘Aphorism Countertime’; Geoff Dyer, from Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence; Benjamin Friedlander, ‘Gertrude Stein: A Retrospective Criticism’; Peter Gizzi, ‘Correspondences of the Book’; Kevin Kopelson, ‘Music Lessons’; Denise Riley, ‘Lyric Selves’; Eve Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’; Ali Smith, ‘Green’; John Wilkinson, ‘Imperfect Pitch’; Sarah Wood, ‘Anew Again’.

Stephen Benson and Clare Connors teach in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Stephen Benson is the author of Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2002) and Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (2006), and the editor of Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (2008). Clare Connors is the author of Force from Nietzsche to Derrida and Literary Theory: A Beginner’s Guide (2010).