A guide to the creative possibilities of critical writing, with sample texts from a range of writers and critics
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 works whose formal and intellectual inventiveness is inseparable from a deep fidelity to the writing or art they address. Of interest to all students, teachers and critics of literature and creative writing, this anthology gathers 14 exemplary texts, which share a common question: how to write criticism in response to artworks whose aim is to change the ways in which we see and describe our world? Impatient with the language of most academic critical writing, Creative Criticism dares to imagine that things might be different.

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 and explanatory headnotes to each text

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 (both 2010).


Cover image: © sorhed (hedsor) 2012.

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Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Suggested Further Reading; A Note on the Texts; 1. Roland Barthes, from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments; 2. John Cage, from 'Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?'; 3. Anne Carson, 'Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)'; 4. Hélène Cixous, 'Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner's taking off'; 5. Jacques Derrida 'Aphorism Countertime'; 6. Geoff Dyer, from Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence; 7. Benjamin Friedlander, 'Gertrude Stein: A Retrospective Criticism'; 8. Peter Gizzi, 'Correspondences of the Book'; 9. Kevin Kopelson, 'Music Lessons'; 10. Denise Riley, 'Lyric Selves'; 11. Eve Sedgwick, 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl'; 12. Ali Smith, 'Green'; 13. John Wilkinson, 'Imperfect Pitch'; 14. Sarah Wood, 'Anew Again'.