A Graduate English Major's Search For Meaning: Toward A Pedagogy Of Creative Rhetoric

Abstract

Building upon recent work by Gerald Graff, Tim Mayers, Douglas Hesse, and Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll, I propose a pedagogical approach that integrates creative writing with rhetoric, much as the emerging "creative writing studies" is integrating creative writing with literature. As I demonstrate through a fusion of personal, academic, and creative writing, composition pedagogies that have ignored creative writing have alienated writing-disposed students such as myself, as well as failed to prepare them for basic and necessary writing and teaching tasks outside the university. As an antidote to these problems, I suggest Creative Rhetoric, a pedagogy that champions authentic communications for authentic audiences (the rhetorical consideration), while also engendering creativity both in process and product (the creative consideration). Such an approach, I argue, not only helps repair departmental fragmentation while better equipping students for the twenty-first century workforce, but it also raises satisfaction for English majors as it develops the whole person, writer along with rhetor and critic.