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"UNDISCIPLINED WRITING"
While most creative writing abides by generic prescriptions, so too does writing in disciplines that are traditionally un-creative, namely those intended for academic, journalistic, or popular audiences. These disciplines are likewise beholden to certain standards: conventions, style guides, disciplinary edicts, academic protocols, implied audiences, and the demands of the commercial marketplace. Occasionally, authors will transcend or thumb their noses at these prescriptions, approaching their subject matter with a surprising methodology, unexpected literariness, artful verve, or disarming approach. This chapter explores such works as journalism (in its guises of exposé and writing on food, music, travel, sports, science, and the environment); writing in academic disciplines (history, economy, philosophy, law, ethnography, and architecture); criticism (art, literary, and cultural criticism); biography (roman à clef, character studies, fragmented biography, double portraits); and popular/entertainment categories (coffee table books, pop science, and sex manuals). When creative writers infiltrate disciplinary venues or disciplinary writers bring creativity to their style, the resulting work partakes in a scrappy, experimental ethos that flies in the face of hidebound disciplinary formulas.
Links
● Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”
● Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization
● Nicole Walker, from Letters to Ducey Op-Ed
● Rem Koolhass, Delirious New York
● David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”
· Dennis W. Arrow, “Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak and Constitutional ‘Meaning’ for the Uninitiated”
● Jerry Saltz, “My Life as a Failed Artist”
● Excerpt of Raygun Interview with David Carsonin Wingdings
● Excerpt from Daniel Mahoney’s Sunblind Almost Motorcrash
● The Dark Mountain Project, “Manifesto”
● Xavier de Maistre, A Voyage Round My Room
● Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies
· Edmund Gosse, Chapter 6 from Father and Son
● Neil Sinhababu, “Possible Girls”
● Jamison Crabtree, Review of Patti Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
● M. F. K. Fisher, “Cooking on High”
