SCRIPTUM
Creative Writing Research Journal vol 6, 1/2019
Vasilis Papageorgiou: writing and research • 4 Päivi Kosonen: towards therapeutic reading • 17 Paul Graves: rhythm in black & white • 40 Johanna Pentikäinen: työpajamalliin perustuva kirjoittamisen kouluopetus • 79
university of jyväskylä /
Areas of Scriptum Creative Writing Studies
Artistic research: authors researching their own art, art as research.
Literary theory: Studies on narratology, intertex- tuality, tropes and the figures of the text or metafic- tion. Theories related in creative writing.
Media writing: Studies on film and multimedia and writing, manuscripts, adaptation of literature on multimedia, visual narrative, voice in narrative and poetry.
Pedagogy of writing: Studies on teaching chil- dren and young in verbal art, writing in schools, free groups and internet forums, workshops of writing, master and novice, comments between authors.
Poetics; Studies on composing the text; the genres of prose, lyrics and drama, the style, experimental and methodical writing, programmed poetry, writing as philosophical asking.
Poetry therapy: Studies in writing and mourn- ing, depression, mental health, individual therapy, healing narratives and metaphors, healing groups, writing and self care, web healing.
Process of writing: Studies on schemes and composing the text, skills and virtuosity of writing, creative process, different versions of the text, tex- tual criticism, verbal choices, shadows of the story, online writing, improvisation, editing, co-operation and collaborative writing.
Rhetoric: Studies on expression and audience, reader, public spheres.
Social media: Studies on digital writing, visual rhetoric with writing, social publicity, networks be- tween writers.
Submitted articles undergo a supportive review process and a ref- eree process by two mentors. We welcome 400 word abstracts and proposals for reviews. The editorial board reserves the right to evaluate which articles will be published, based on the referee state- ments. Authors must confirm that the submitted manuscript has not been published previously or submitted for publication else- where. More information and instructions for authors by email:
creativewritingstudies@jyu.fi
Vasilis Papageorgiou
Writing and research
from a writer’s notebook
There were several levels of research – fiction writer’s research.
Don DeLillo
Dear Vasilis,
I had this epiphany that morning, the result of some- thing dreamt perhaps the night that just passed or another maybe, or even one that is in wait, it was you as you are, and this “you are” was double and multiplying in different modes, you were expressing yourself while you were stud- ying yourself, you were changing shapes while searching in you and around you, you were inside and outside yourself at the same time, enjoying with your body, heart and mind the moment and the place you were at, the event you were enacting, enjoying how the abysmal was continually turn- ing into an ever so fine, ever so intricate and yet ever so lucid and familiar, even warm, arrangement. I was speaking to you and you were speaking to me, asking me or reciting to me with a pleasure and a curiosity that was becoming even greater by the fact that you at the same time could neither be inside me nor outside me, you had neither a self,
a being, nor a manner of being. You were and then you were not, you were that activity and then that other, all the time that you never left me. Or did you?
Who is doing what, how and why? Will we be able to do it in the future? What is our future? How do we relate to our world and its future?
Working consciously with the how, the form, with the aesthetic.
Working consciously with the what, the content, with knowledge.
Working consciously with the synthesis and interaction of form and content, the what and how, with what I say and how I say it, with what I depict and how I depict it.
For instance, the intimate relationship between essay and art: to have a thesis or produce a thesis, and show a thesis, enact a thesis within a form. To give the text its texture, its expression and sensuality. The result of a praxis that is also a praxis itself, the revealing of a practicing that presuppos- es and produces the parameters of its being. Dianoia and lexis, intellect and word.
Doing entails knowing something and being able to give form to this something, while at the same time aspiring to do more, to either form or know more, or both. It is the ancient way of interacting with cosmos and cosmetics:
the way the world was, is and could be, and at the very same time the way the world was, is and could be formed.
The intentions and the way the doer’s heart beats could take us in different directions, make us give emphasis to the what or the how, mingle them, harmonize them, play with them, bring them even against each other. Aesthetics and science, surface and the mechanisms that enable it. For
instance, the Greek word for color: Chroma: skin, color, complexion, character of style, modification, ornaments, embellishments, complexion of heavenly bodies.
This then is a series of manifestations of forms of objects and activities. Manifestations that are generated by and generate knowledge. They talk to me and you, they enter us, modify us, transform us. The I as knowledge or form, or both, towards the you as knowledge or form, or both.
And what for me, as I, as an event in becoming, is most important: the way the how and the what are perceived in relation to logos, to truth and to identity. Here it is a logos without logos that informs what follows, a logos that examines logos as a function and malfunction within the cosmos, that turns cosmos into cosmetics. And in a way, such a presupposition suspends and even annuls any effort to polarize or limit. This is why the heart should beat in the right place, the right time, that of generosity and re- sponsibility when it expresses itself, when it affects others and itself, when it shows intimacy and moves from inside to outside, and then to inside again. A palindromic move- ment of the heart that has its beginning long before the work of art is conceived, and reaches far beyond it.
When do writers do their research? Maybe all the time?
Do they not do it before and during the process of com- posing their literary text? The latter can of course be in any genre and placed in any time in history, past, present or fu- ture. This is a form of artistic research that can be practiced and discussed together or in contrast with the research that the writer might do after the literary text is finally written:
it could have the form of a terse meta-commentary or a multilayered meta-text, or it could be given the more or
less open form of artistic or philological commentary.
Are there any other than operational differences be- tween these two research activities, the one before or dur- ing, and the one after the creation of the text? How do they contribute to the formation, reception and evaluation a text? And can these two kinds of research be done by other researchers than the writer of the particular text? Are there any more kinds of research pertaining to the creation and analysis or deconstruction of a text? How do we ap- proach literary texts that are openly and even challengingly a combination of art and research, that are both fiction and essay at the same time, a far-reaching interaction of aesthet- ics and knowledge? Is there any work of art that does not already include research? And while writers turn research into a work of art that a literary text is, how do the same writers or any other writer, artist or any enquiring person turn a work of art into a subject for research?
And then, when it comes to its moment of urgency, of explaining or even justifying: How do we teach research in relation to creative writing? What is most imperative in teaching creative writing at a university: The writing itself or the research done in relation to it, both before and after the text is written? How do we evaluate our double activity and its results? How is the market and the agora (two differ- ent terms as I hope to show soon) involved in this activity?
The fields of the writing processes, its theoretical and practical contexts would for me include the challenge of our times, the way events and ideas are shaped, their sourc- es, arrangements, modalities, their nomadic movements, the monadic search for independence and individuality, the necessity of composing, its concerns, urgencies, trans-
lations, its diasporic and aporetic complexity, its impossi- bilities and affirmations, its ability to inspire and generate new texts and contexts, its melancholies and euphorias, the deliberate and forced migrations of people, identities, lan- guages, bodies, digits in an open world, in bodies with- out organs, texts without texts, in a logos without logos.
The ethics in, with, through and beyond our worlds. And then inevitably the strictures and dangers of crossing bor- ders, the violence of uprooting and the unconditionality of generosity that reaches beyond knowledge by affecting and touching in an open and immediate presence, in the opening of a yet unknown and even unknowable piece of life, that is also eternal in itself.
Various schools and programs, starting from what they take now as a given, the arbitrary polarity scientific versus artistic research, seem to have knowledge as their ultimate goal. For instance, the Swedish Research Council privileges knowledge against aesthetic experience, something that is emphasized by the fact that in Swedish it is called “Vet- enskapsrådet”, “Science Council”, excluding thus the Arts right from the beginning, and by the motto that follows on the top of its website: “Research for a wiser world,” “The Swedish Research Council is Sweden’s largest governmental research funding body, and supports research of the highest quality within all scientific fields.”1 Wisdom and science, the knowing and the thinking it requires are what the arts are in need of in order to offer themselves, as though art and the pleasures it generates in the mind and body were without them until now. In any case the Swedish Research Council thus far has failed to explain what artistic research 1 https://vr.se/english.html (17.11.2018).
is, although in its new presentation (that is still under con- sideration) it speaks of an already “established” field.
Knowledge is given the first place also in the artistic re- search that is done in the International Music Institute in Darmstadt: “Artistic research is a young discipline which has stirred up not only academic but also artistic discourse.
It is based on the notion that knowledge is inherent in aes- thetic experience and practice. This knowledge is not nec- essarily directly accessible through reason; it often evades the logic of language, and can therefore not be approached through regular research methods alone.”2 (Knowledge was privileged in previous presentations in the master program for artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. These could be read on the Internet and can now be found in online archives. In the current presentation, how- ever, as in the Swedish one, artistic research is approached and described through its different practices rather than directly defined. In its previous presentation the Swedish Council stated: “The point of departure for artistic research is found in the artistic process and works. Research, regard- less of art form, is practice-based and includes intellectual reflection aimed at developing new knowledge.” Maybe the criticism that has since then been directed against such definitions has been of decisive importance in rethinking the already obsolete arbitrariness. Similarly, the Nether- lands Film Academy, still keeping the body and its senses out, redefined artistic research as “neither a discipline nor a methodology. Instead, it’s a state of mind, a ‘mentality’ or 2 http://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/kurse/
kuenstlerische-forschung-als-kompositions-oder-auffuehrungspraxis/
(17.11.2018).
an attitude”,3 while in an older text on the subject artistic research was presented “as a form of knowledge produc- tion”. See also, Hakan Topal’s text “Notes on dOCUMEN- TA (13): Artistic Research”, in which knowledge, despite its mention together with “intuition” and “experience” plays the central role: “When an artist enters into a social realm to conduct research, intuition allows her/him to generate in-situ knowledge, therefore a particularly practical intel- lectual opening.” And further down: “artistic research aims to create a type of knowledge”.)4
A few days ago, I received two mails from Research Cat- alogue announcing events about artistic research in which knowledge occupies a central position.5 The first event em- phasizes the role of thought and knowledge in the pro- duction of sounds and music,6 while the second has the title “Knowing in performing.”7 All this is very exciting and promising in many ways, but at the same time it seems to presuppose that artists maybe do not already know much about knowing while creating, or that the artwork is sec- ondary to artistic research.
But why do polarizing, reducing and downright nega- tion take hold within the university? Why do they express
3 https://www.filmacademie.ahk.nl/en/master-film/programme/
artistic-research/ (17.11. 2018).
4 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2012/08/notes-on-docu- menta-13-artistic-research/ (17 November 2018).
5 https://www.researchcatalogue.net. (17.11.2018).
6 http://ruukku-journal.fi/en/next-issue (17.11.2018).
7 https://www.mdw.ac.at/knowinginperforming_rvo/ (17.11.2018).
such a need to prevail? Why does funding and evaluation of institutions have to be based on negation and create barriers that go against their pronouncements about dem- ocratic values, principles and freedoms, against the respect and the empathy that is unconditionally needed in any migrating activity (pleasurable, as that of flaneuring, or a result of violence), be that artistic research and work, pre- or post-research, or even the project of an escapist, one who observes or enjoys from afar or while fleeing, one who is an ascetic, for whom representing and thinking work are versions of monasteries, one who cannot tolerate borders and definitions, or is after the movement or event or the argument or the epiphany that might sustain the divide between art and knowledge? Why steal and appropriate a term and an activity that has already become open and dar- ing and is always inviting more openness and challenge?
And this openness, is it not an artwork already, a pre-work and meta-work, a pre-text and meta-text? Does it not in- clude its own presuppositions and arguments about its own being as event, form and meaning? Why erase all this just to establish yet another dogmatic activity?
And now the practical, but mainly grounding question:
What is the position of the education that will lead to the creation of artworks in the world of the university and the various institutions that support and fund it, and at times even attempt to dominate it? Whom, what and how are the departments of Fine Arts going to fund and be funded by?
How are they going to structure their present and future education programs and activities, their efforts and visions in order to employ the teachers they believe will advance and broaden these programs and activities? What do uni-
versities want from artists who teach? What do they want from art courses? What do students want?
In many ways it appears and it might even be the case that the university is under siege. Even worse, it is already captured. And all this has to do with putting up borders and placing it under the powers of the market. Funding is served by and serves definitions. This interdependence that, helped by a technical administration and a cloud of entrepreneurial fallacies, undermines democratic and free thinking, and ignores the fact that university already is a market. It is an agora, where ideas are generated, debated, tested, upset or transgressed. The market applies, sells, buys and exploits. The agora questions, researches, doubts and self-doubts. We face questions about rules and the breaking of the rules, about typifying and questioning the typified, about the relation between quality and quantity, between the general and specific, about the relation between the ox- ymoron and the pleonastic in the expression “free market,”
if we are speaking of the market as agora, a place where we can express ourselves freely within the various events of de- mocracy, while questioning it or broadening it. University, being already more than the market, is the agora where even the philosophy and art of negotiation are debated.
Here is your poem from your website8 dedicated to John Ashbery’s ninetieth birthday and inspired by his play with knowing and forming, his mastery of the breezeway, which is also the title of a collection of poems he published in 2015:
8 https://chromatachromata.com/2017/07/28/τζον-άσμπερυ-john- ashbery-at-90/ (17.11.2018).
John Ashbery at 90
Three haikus as shadows for collages University
is already more than the market. It is the agora where
exchanging terms are formed, all terms debated.
Stoas, lyceums arcades, secret gardens, needed breezeways.
It is also inside these different forms of agora, different forms of learning, reflecting and debating spaces, that the phenomenon of peer reviewing strikes me as not only re- dundant, but highly immoral (as the frequently used term
“blind reviewing” reveals: something not transparent or open, something clandestine) and practically useless. Is it possible to examine the legitimacy of new forms of expres- sion, opinions, critical approaches, propositions for discus- sion, without ever attempting to censor or normalize them, especially when these aim at daringly deconstructing, ques- tioning or suspending established notions and ways of cre- ating and thinking? Is it possible to study, use and cite texts by those who are not or refuse to be peer reviewed, with- out risking disapproval and rejection? Will these artists and writers themselves not be allowed to enter the university
world at all? Similarly, those who, for various reasons, re- fuse to peer review, will they be ostracized from the acade- my, or marginalized?
Those then who agree to peer review, why do they do it (and especially without being paid)? Is it because they believe in the advance of sciences and the arts? Is it merely a matter of surviving in hard academic times? Do they do it out of friendship, and if so, is this not suspicious when it comes to taking a critical or adversary stance, one that transgresses the circle of friendship? Do they believe in the system, which is equally suspicious and naïve, that is dan- gerous in both cases? Are they capable of understanding and appreciating what they are about to read and evaluate?
Are they not intimidated by the procedures that demand that they interfere in the thinking of other people or of messing with the sensitivities of artists and their works?
Are the uninstitutionalized artists or authors to be avoided, ignored as sources of inspiration, interaction and reference? Is the work that is created outside the institu- tionalized, the quantified and conventionalized a part of another world altogether, one that must be discriminated against or negated? Are all peer reviewing journals respect- ed as equal, and if not why? Who decides it, and why is such a phenomenon accepted or tolerated to begin with?
Are we soon to lose the ability to judge ourselves, to be critical without relying on the system of peer reviewing or any Norwegian list? Are we not in the critical business, expressing opinions rather that verifying facts, proposing hypotheses and speculations that must retain and cultivate the right to be visionary, radical, groundbreaking, upset- ting, controversial, polemical?
Is not all this blindness creating a fear that a power above democracy in secrecy controls and regulates the limits of democracy? That it is beyond, unreachable by democracy?
We discriminate any time we, through negation, choose something over something else. Why not affirm everything that promotes affirmation itself? Dividing into this and that discipline might throw light on something dark, but does it not in turn darken something else? Is peer review- ing respecting affirmation or does it start from and re- main within an established system of rules, trying to fit all thought in this system?
The difficulties with peer reviewing become more com- plicated in confronting works of art. Artists, as Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us, create beautiful forms and work with the concept of beauty.9 They invite us to consider the con- cept of beauty itself, the relation of the beautiful in any work of art to beauty, as well as the relation between what is beautiful for the artist and for anyone who admires it, the role of aesthetics and its relation to truth and ethics, to desire and pleasure. More than that, they invite us to reenact thinking itself, to consider its conditions and its place in the world. Working with forms and knowledge, and creating even more beauty, artists offer us more cos- mos, reaching beyond knowledge and any words, into an openness that invites further pleasure, wonder and quest, aware that there is always the risk that knowledge might even destroy art and the beauty in it, might arrest the pro- gressing of opening.
9 Jean-Luc Nancy: God, justice, love, beauty: Four little dialogues.
Translated by Sarah Clift. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011, 97ff.
Artworks position us and themselves in an expanded cosmos, thus becoming independent of their maker, as well as of any peer reviewer that aspires to decide their fate. What or whom then are the peer reviewers judging:
The artists or the object of art they have created and which lives its own life beyond any effort to restrict it or reform it? Or are they judging the whole context, the setup that has made the artwork possible and which gives it its im- measurable meanings within both history and any present and future moment? The artwork is a living organism, cre- ated and creating other organisms, an active event, an ever transforming and transformable arrangement, a pleasura- ble modality that reaches us always itself as an always aug- menting, an always epiphanic other.
Dear Vasilis,
from within this relation to art and its world, in which it doesn’t feel strange, it doesn’t feel oxymoronic at all to say that I have the epiphany I mentioned at the beginning of my address to you constantly, I greet you
most cordially The artwork
vasilis papageorgiou is Professor of Creative Writing and Reader in Comparative Literature in the Department of Film and Literature at Linnaeus University, writer in Greek and Swedish, and translator.
Päivi Kosonen
Towards Therapeutic Reading
part ii:
the interactive process of reading
Reading offers an opportunity to become close to another person, to be absorbed in another person’s words, experi- ence the world in another person’s shoes, and see through someone else’s eyes. A great deal of research has been car- ried out into reading and the effects of reading and much has been written on the topic, but there is no common understanding of the interactive state that reading brings about. What really happens when we read? To answer this question, I turned to bibliotherapy theory and research on reading in the field of literary studies with the aim of gain- ing a greater understanding of the processes of therapeutic reading.
The fundamental text on interactive bibliotherapy is con- sidered to be Arleen McCarty Hynes and Mary Hynes-Ber- ry’s book Biblio/Poetry Therapy. The Interactive Process: A Handbook (1986/2012). The book provides guidance in bibliotherapy in particular and has less to say about writ-
ing-based methods. The book also offers a great deal of useful information on questions concerning the use of ma- terial, the characteristics and professional skills of a bib- liotherapist or reading therapist, and the basics of group dynamics. The most important element of the book in terms of therapeutic reading is the four-stage bibliothera- py process, the four stages being recognition, examination, juxtaposition, and finally application to self, i.e. applying what has been read and reflected on to oneself and one’s own life (ibid., pp. 31–48). The idea is that literature is the catalyst; a section of text evokes an emotional response in the reader which enables the therapy process to begin, with the help of the bibliotherapist or bibliotherapy group lead- er, based on their approach and theory-in-use together with the therapy client or the member of the group (ibid., p. 33).
Bibliotherapists in the Nordic countries are familiar with the bibliotherapy model created in the US by Benedictine nun Arleen McCarty Hynes (1916–2006) for St. Elizabeths Hospital library and developed further by her daughter, Dr Mary Hynes-Berry MD. An updated form of the model is taught as part of the basics of bibliotherapy and referred to in recent debate and research in Finland (Kähmi 2015) and in Sweden (Frid 2016). The model is useful, but debate sur- rounding bibliotherapy pays surprisingly little attention to its theoretical foundation and practices, let alone its appli- cation as part of different theories-in-use. Perhaps the mod- el is so clear and so unambiguously practical that there is no need to discuss it. Is everyone already clear about what lies at the bibliotherapeutic heart of the model? Discussion and interaction, undoubtedly, as well as emotions and pro- cessing emotions? Where did the stages in the model come
from? And how can new research on the reading process be incorporated into it?
further development of the bibliotherapy model
Some additions have been made to the bibliotherapy mod- el. Docent in psychology, and Finnish bibliotherapy theo- ry pioneer, Juhani Ihanus, for example, has addressed the element of literature and reading, the “third element” of that interactive process, a textual transitional object which is of central importance in creative and expressive work- ing. In people’s minds, writing is easily placed in this third space but creativity also has an effect in reading and biblio- therapy. Reading can open up an opportunity to shift from an “empty existence of monologue” to a state of dialogue and polylogue enabled by the views and voices offered by literature (Ihanus 2004, p. 27). On this basis – once it has been possible to enter the state of reading or it has been able to be entered together – it can be claimed that liter- ature opens up the simultaneous existence of alternative perspectives and interpretations of reality, as professor of comparative literature Hanna Meretoja writes in her book The Ethics of Storytelling (2018).
In this third space, emotions, meanings and an under- standing start to be processed, and the purpose of the bibli- otherapeutic process is to process them – working towards exactly this interactivity, in other words exploring the meanings and alternative interpretations through mutual discussion (McCarty Hynes & Hynes-Berry 1986/2012;
Ihanus 2004, pp. 27–31). Indeed, Ihanus (2009, p. 25) later headed in this direction, supplementing McCarty Hynes and Hynes-Berry’s process model and re-stating its steps and the elements between those steps from the point of view of narrative theory and expression theory. I consider his additions important, emphasising as they do the impor- tance of creative imagination and wordplay and the emer- gence of a creative expressive state so as to enable iden- tification and further processing. Here this is possibly a question of the “creative reading” to which Leena Sippola (2004, p. 53) refers.
Leena Sippola, who has been running bibliotherapy groups in libraries for years, uses the term creative reading (kreativt läsande) (2004). By this she means active and criti- cal reading, unfettered thinking about the viewpoints and emotions offered by the text, an intellectual and emotion- al reading process that can also affect the reader’s mental wellbeing. The question is thus of a creative process taking place while reading. Sippola has examined the reading pro- cess in general terms from a psychological viewpoint and identified the elements of the reading event, the most im- portant of which she defines as identification, introjection, projection and catharsis. The foundation here is thus an understanding of reading as a third space or transitional object and the reader’s intensive empathising with the text when in that space, “borrowing” the thoughts and feelings conveyed by the text and transferring them to themselves.
In catharsis, however, the focus is on emotional cleansing or an experience of alleviation. Rhythm and images, sym- bols and their impact in the reading event also form a cat- egory of their own. (Sippola 2004, pp. 53–57.)
Another researcher, emeritus professor of social work Nicholas Mazza (2003, pp. 17–23), who has been develop- ing poetry therapy, has specified influential elements in the bibliotherapeutic process: reception, expressiveness, and symbolism or ceremonial. By reception he refers to the use of literature and reading in the working situation, while ex- pressiveness refers to writing, and symbolic or ceremonial elements to the ritualistic aspects of the session. He does not elaborate on the practices of reading or processes of creating something new. In Karoliina Kähmi’s (2015) thesis on poetry therapy, which draws on Mazza’s theories, the connection between reading and metaphor theory remains indistinct and is overshadowed by expressive writing.
thoughts on reading in literary studies
What remains of a book once it has been read? Images, glimpses, hints? Have I really read the book? What does that mean? Opened it, been absorbed by it? Made it my own? Or has the book read me? Has it forced itself into my head, where it continues its wanderings like a seed or a virus, giving rise to new visions that I would like to escape but cannot? Like a fly larva in my flesh? (Korhonen 2011, p. 35.)
Literature researchers, for their part, have pondered reading – the dynamics and process of reading – in recent decades.
In her book Uses of Literature (2009) Rita Felski, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, writes about the pow- er of literature that the formal and ultra-critical approach-
es of literary research have not succeeded in quenching:
“How is it,”, she asks “that black squiggles on a page can conjure up such vivid simulacra of persons, things, actions, places; that readers can experience such powerful sensa- tions and emotions as we react to these shadows and phan- tasms?” (Felski 2009, p. 61.)
Professor of literature Kuisma Korhonen writes in the same spirit in the quote above – as though reading had never been researched or as if we knew nothing about it.
However, reading has been an enduring topic in modern literary research since the 1960s and 1970s, and Felski and Korhonen have themselves written numerous books and articles on the subject.
Literary researcher Siru Kainulainen also shares this ethos of wonder in her book (2015a) on reading poetry. The title of an editorial written by Kainulainen in the online maga- zine Kiiltomato (11.8.2015b) plainly sets out the facts: “We don’t yet know about the interactive experience of reading”.
Behind what appears to be a blunt headline are fundamen- tal deliberations and justified questions. If literature or liter- ary fiction is thought of as being interactive, what does that mean? What happens in the interactive state of reading?
What happens to me when I read, in the reading event, there in the state of experiencing reading, the third space?
How does reading move me? These questions inspired Ka- inulainen to start researching the reading and reception of modern poetry – but in a way that would also enable atten- tion to be paid to the sensation of the poem, in other words the physical-sensual experience taking place during reading;
listening and feeling the voices heard in the text.
the phenomenology of reading
The deliberations on reading presented above originate in the rupture of the concept of the human or subject in hu- manistic theories, in fact in a fragmentation or blurring of the understanding regarding the human. In terms of liter- ary research, this concerns the shift from work to text and from author to reader that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. This turning point is associated with a huge num- ber of researchers and thinkers, fields and research focuses both in the US and in Europe, but from today’s perspec- tive it seems clear that at this precise moment a modern, pluralistic understanding of reading was produced, the ba- sis on which the questions raised by Felski, Korhonen and Kainulainen draw. I find this discussion in literary theory useful in terms of bibliotherapy.
This understanding – which I will now term here the phenomenology of reading – can roughly be summarised in four theses. One: Reading is not passive but active re- ception. Two: By reading we create the work actively in relation to ourselves and our own interpretive community.
Three: Reading is an all-encompassing mental and somatic event. Four: We change, we create and we shape ourselves in our reading.
Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) was among the first to sys- tematically research the experiential interaction associated with reading. As he saw it, the meaning of the text is the impact that is experienced. Reading is not passive but an active event in which the text (the written object) and the reader (the reading subject) meet. The text springs to life by being read and similarly the reader fits themselves into the
text; the reader fills gaps in the text, builds the meaning of the text in the light of their own memories, as well as their predictions and imaginings. As reading takes place, the text flows through the reader’s mind like a constantly expand- ing network of connections, through which the meaning of the text is parsed and built – never reaching an overall or final interpretation but always shifting in the light of each encounter. Over his career as an academic, Iser tended to more strongly emphasise the processual nature of reading and the importance of a constantly changing perspective, a kind of moving third space, a moving horizon, as a conse- quence of which something is brought into the world that previously did not exist (poiesis), and as a consequence of which the reader embarks on a transformational process.
(Iser 1972/1974; 1976/1978; 2000.) Is this not the same idea that lies at the heart of Sippola’s concept of creative read- ing?
the movement of reading
In the 2000s, Finnish writer Jyrki Vainonen seems in his collection of essays (2014) to already be smoothly stepping in the footsteps of Iser and playing beautifully with the idea of reading as walking. To him it is clear that reading is not merely staying motionless in one place, an action based on the sense of sight, but that when reading, a reader moves mentally and physically. In one essay, Vainonen cre- ates a picture of literature as a place, a landscape of forking paths, in which writer and reader journey, but at different times, unbeknownst to each other. When the reader enters
a landscape that the writer has filtered through their own world of experiences, the reader starts to seek their own route through the world through which the writer has al- ready passed:
The landscape created by the writer and the events the writ- er has written taking place there are now filtered through a new, different, world of experiences. The words of the land- scape are the same but the experience is different, familiar but alien at the same time. When the writer has written about an old tree that spreads its foliage above the garden, the writer might have envisaged an oak. The reader, howev- er, finding their way to the same invented view, might see a maple. And so on. (Vainonen 2014, p. 83.)
Iser’s tradition is one of emphasising communication, the encounter that takes place when reading. Many writers and countless literature researchers have subsequently contin- ued and deepened this. I would particularly like to men- tion researchers Maurice Blanchot and Jean Starobinski in Continental Europe and Paul de Man in the US, who have a phenomenological focus.
In his classic article “Autobiography as De-facement”
(1979), Paul de Man (1919–1983) sums up his understand- ing of the nature of the reading encounter. He writes about reading as a special autobiographical specular moment, as an encounter in which the reading subject draws closer to the other person reflected in the text, which he terms alignment. And like Alice through the Looking Glass, read- ing can take the reader to some kind of intermediate or dual awareness, often to a third space termed creative or
reflexive, in which the reader is simultaneously inside and outside his or her own self. I read, live and experience a text at the same time as the text “reads” me – influenc- es and shapes me. It is thus possible that when reading, the reading subject encounters in the lines of the text an- other person in some way similar to themselves – neither identical nor completely different – or some identifiable aspect or thing or emotion and may through this, out of this encounter, bring to themselves something new. (de Man 1979.) To deconstructionists like Paul de Man, this is precisely the revolutionary power of language: in the in- cessant opportunity for misreading, at the basis of which is language, rhetoric, which is always outside the conscious control of the subject (Savolainen 2011).
the emotions of reading
A phenomenologist from a younger generation, Rita Felski is on the same wavelength, but she focuses more attention on the reader and the experiential and affective states and emotions aroused by literature in the reader, especially en- chantment and horror. She too writes about the fundamen- tal encounter that takes place in reading and calls this pro- cess recognition, something in which familiar and strange, old and new, oneself and another (not oneself) meet. With- out referring to the psychology of reading, she defines the encounter as a kind of self-recognition, in which something previously known becomes known again or in a new way:
“I feel myself addressed, summoned, called to account: I cannot help seeing traces of myself in the pages I am read-
ing. Indisputably, something has changed; my perspective has shifted; I see something that I did not see before” (Fel- ski 2009, p. 23.)
Alongside the transformative and revolutionary aspects of language raised by Wolfgang Iser and Paul de Man, Rita Felski thus highlights the opportunity of recognition to create an experience or some kind of internal upheaval: be- coming seen and recognised in another’s eyes. According to Felski, this may happen while reading, and that other may be the book and the other speaking within it – in oth- er words the other voice I hear in the text. With its help and through it, I have an opportunity to experience that I am not alone. Thus, in Felski’s view, it is possible to deep- en the experience of self (self-intensification) or to broaden it (self-extension). Felski considers it important to emphasise that recognition is not identification and that the reader’s uniqueness is preserved in the state of recognition and the state of encounter that it creates. (Felski 2009, p. 39.)
The encounter that takes place during reading can also be identification, however, as Sippola (2004) writes, and sometimes even a desire to be absorbed in another per- son, as Siri Hustvedt, herself a writer conversant with phe- nomenology writes in her collection of essays The Shaking Woman:
The closest we can get to this entrance into another per- son’s mind is through reading. Reading is the mental arena where different thought styles, tough and tender, and the ideas generated by them become most apparent. We have access to a stranger’s internal narrator. Reading, after all, is a way of living inside another person’s words. His or her
voice becomes my narrator for the duration. Of course I retain my own critical faculties [--] but the more compel- ling the voice on the page is, the more I lose my own. I am seduced and give myself up to the other person’s words.
(Hustvedt 2010, p. 148.)
Western literature is, of course, full of examples of readers of the Madame Bovary type, who forget themselves and remain standing on the threshold of their own lives, as au- thor Eila Kostamo writes in her collection of essays (1992).
While reading, it is possible to drift into another stream, to be so enchanted as to lose one’s own voice. One can immerse oneself in another world. You can also freeze in horror and end up in an almost catatonic state. As well as by Flaubert, this kind of frozen state has been explored by Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist in his prose fiction, in- cluding in the novel Livläkarens besök (translated into Eng- lish as The Royal Physician’s Visit) (see Kosonen 2004).
The above emotional states of reading – enchantment, terror – have been addressed in literary research by virtue of the affective turn which has taken place in humanistic research. This turn too springs as I see it from a phenom- enological research tradition. In the area of reading emo- tions – in identification, sensations, emotions, attachment, convergence, distancing, moving, immersing – we are only taking our first steps, but an ever increasing number of thinkers are addressing the subject.
One of them is Peter Kivy (2006/2009), according to whom reading to oneself can be thought of as an expres- sion that the reader presents to themselves, as an event comparable to a musical performance, the meaning of
which lies in the modality of the voice, the tone of voice, the chime, the flavour brought to the body by the voice.
Reading becomes listening, a thought that Laura Wahlfors has developed in her thesis (2013) which brings together literary theory and music theory. It is perhaps no coinci- dence that inspirations and inventions in British multi-dis- ciplinary research into shared reading are associated with reading out loud (e.g. Billington et al. 2017).
transformative reading
We move a step closer to bibliotherapeutic practices – per- haps to the basis of identification – with psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. In his book Being a Character. Psychoa- nalysis and Self Experience (1992/1994), he outlines the expe- rience of self and the individual process of change from the point of view of object relations theory. His observations on a third space, a choice of object, and a moment of evoc- ative or intense experience offer further illumination on the process of reading and consideration of its influential mechanisms. Bollas uses literature and reading as one of his examples, but he is in no way a reading theorist. In the debate on the transformative potential of reading, howev- er, he is cited both on the bibliotherapy side and the lit- erary theory side (e.g. Linnainmaa 2009; Campbell 2009).
Object relations theory interprets objects and the world of objects broadly. An object may be another object, a thing or another person. We load the world with our own subjectivity and the people, places, things and events around us with our own idiomatic meanings – knowingly
and unknowingly. We live in a world of our own meanings and we move within it in a field of objects loaded with our own personal meanings. Objects thus carry our individu- al projections. Also in choosing – knowingly or unknow- ingly – an object, we put ourselves into it. Our choice of objects is a form of self-expression. “[O]bjects, like words, are there for us to express ourselves” (Bollas 1992/1994, p.
36). When we choose an object – select music to listen to, phone someone, pick up a particular book – we modify our own internal world of experience. New mental tapes- tries and networks arise that can lead us into unforeseen areas and new ways of being. The object chosen contains the potential to change me. When I choose a book, I may be choosing an object, but once I am engaging with that book – not to mention reading it – it brings its own integ- rity to our encounter, its own way of being, and affects me in ways that I could not have predicted. (Bollas 1992/1994, pp. 33–46.)
Christopher Bollas distinguishes four areas of self-expe- rience or aspects associated with objects. The first has to do with using the object. Whether this is a question of choos- ing a novel to read or a person to contact, I use the object;
I have chosen it, it is my choice. But the person or novel I choose also changes me. That special nature – the integrity – of the object – shapes me, produces mental images and associations, leads to emotions, actions. This is the second area of self-experience. But if or when I enter into a deep state of experiencing reading, I forget myself, and in a way, there is no separation between the subject using the object and the simple object any more. Now we are in that inter- mediate area, a third area or space, in which the earlier state
of the subject and the simple integrity of the object have disappeared in an experiential synthesis of mutual interac- tion. In the fourth area of the self, I examine or reflect on myself as an object, I think where I am or have been. This is the area of the complex self. (Bollas 1992/1994, p. 31.)
Bollas depicts a particularly affective experience of self-transformation by referring to a moment of intense ex- perience, an evocative moment. Such a moment creates a kind of internal chime in the mind or an indeterminate mental state. It is clear to us that this is a significant experi- ence – in some way – but it is difficult to put it into words.
The moment may be filled with different images and phys- ical sensations which it is difficult to adequately put into words in a way that would enable us to describe them in a manner that would match our internal experience. (Bollas 1992/1994, pp. 3–4.)
Bollas does not refer to Marcel Proust, but this kind of moment could be precisely the madeleine moment de- scribed in his series of novels In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), an intense and stopping moment in which the particular taste combination of a madeleine cake and lime-flower tea brings to the tongue of the narra- tor Marcel the feeling of childhood and creates an illusion in his mind that it is possible for him to connect with that now lost past – even feel the essence of an experience of the self in the distant past. Proust as a writer seems to paint word-art from memories and the complexity of describing that moment but according to Bollas, it is more common for no clear memory to emerge at all even if we have expe- rienced something significant (Bollas 1992/1994, pp. 3–7).
In the light of Bollas’ object relations theory, it is inter-
esting to pause to consider the process of reading, start- ing from what kinds of objects each of us would choose for their personal mental tapestry of the self. According to Bollas, people who are open to and rich in terms of self-experience seek objects that possess evocative integrity, in other words art or literature that challenges them. Some people, however, are not keen to or capable of spending time in a third area that conveys an experience. They may underrate other people’s evocative and transformative fac- ets and then become narrowed in their choice of object or completely eliminate objects that have a high evocative potential. (Bollas 1992/1994, pp. 31–32.)
From the point of view of a psychoanalyst like Bollas, what is essential is people’s capacity to broaden their minds and their lives: the initial state and a potential change to it. Considering the potential for change has not, however, generally been important from a literary theory standpoint.
Literary researches do not, of course, see reading as purely a matter of choosing a book as an object, although this does matter too (e.g. Macé 2013), but more as the letters and words, the rhythm and images in the book that may conjure up meanings in our minds in many ways. Nor, ac- cording to literature researchers, does all reading contain the same kind of transformative, affective and emotional potential. For example, in the light of the ideas presented by Torsten Pettersson (2009) or in Hanna Meretoja’s recent book The Ethics of Storytelling (2018), it can be thought that reading literary fiction achieves a quite unique subjective transformation in the reader, derived from the structural integrity of that storytelling object, the novel.
towards therapeutic reading?
Is there anything new in ideas of the phenomenology of reading or Bollas’ evocative potential in terms of biblio- therapy? Perhaps, perhaps not. In my understanding, the answer depends on whether you are a bibliotherapy group leader or a bibliotherapist, in other words what your aware- ness is of the mental dynamic, of the interaction in the group, and so on.
Finally, I will take a closer look at the first stage of the bibliotherapy process, which I find interesting. What kinds of experiences do we, as people who carry out bibliother- apy work, have of recognition? In bibliotherapy, recogni- tion is understood as an undefined feeling taking place at the start of the bibliotherapy process –“there’s something in it”. Is this thus something similar to the phenomenolog- ical recognition defined by Rita Felski, referred to above?
The group reads the text and when reading, moments arise where we stand still, where we shift. Intersubjective skills are needed – the leader or therapist’s ability to notice the shifts taking place in the members of the group, which we term recognition. Is a shift in bibliotherapy a wordless mes- sage or a word, a sentence expressed in a particular voice?
And what has actually happened in this reading process?
Something significant – termed recognition – has hap- pened in any case and in the working process it is then ex- plored, seeking comparisons and juxtapositions with past experiences, viewpoints and reflections with other mem- bers of the group too.
Perhaps the phenomenology of reading can offer biblio- therapists a vocabulary for understanding the reading pro-
cess, outlining its physical-sensual or affective exploration process, as a result of which this kind of inspiration termed recognition is born. Writers have always clad this experi- ence in words, as US author Paul Auster writes in a letter addressed to his writer colleague J. M. Coetzee: “But isn’t reading the art of seeing things for yourself, of conjuring up images in your own head? And isn’t the beauty of read- ing all about the silence that surrounds you as you plunge into the story, the sound of the author’s voice resonating inside you to the exclusion of all other sounds?” (Auster &
Coetzee 2013, p. 13.)
In this quote, Auster refers to the lonely moment of reading but literature and culture researchers have recently also talked a great deal about a changing culture of reading and the communal nature of reading (Ahola 2013; Herk- man 2014). Perhaps it is somewhat significant – in an un- derstanding derived from the theory of the interactive na- ture of reading – that an experience of recognition arising in an individual member of a group, forming an attach- ment to the text, is not merely a personal and individual experience, but is born of dialogue and interaction – in the light of other meanings and other people’s stories. Accord- ing to a phenomenological understanding, the recognition that takes place in reading and the realisation of memory that emerges through this process are not merely seen as a personal matter but concern our connection to other peo- ple, our ability to recognise others and connect with oth- ers. (Felski 2008, pp. 48–49.)
Although the importance of the other and the group is understood very well in the world of therapy, the insight derived from the phenomenology of reading may be signif-
icant namely in terms of strengthening the understanding linked to a sense of community and belonging. The thing that chimes within me has some kind of foundation in the text I am reading, that someone else has written. In my reading, I am not alone, I am with someone else on the basis of the written text and with and through the voices I feel and listen to in reading the text – through its dialogic, about which Mikhail Bakhtin and many others have writ- ten. Experiences of recognition are unique and individual, yet at the same time they encompass the power of group discussions, in reflecting similarities, the many different ways in which we are linked to each other.
the need for bibliotherapeutic reading data
It is a delight to carry out bibliotherapy and to constantly be able to experience the influential power of reading and of exploring the texts read in a group, when what is said starts to resonate and create new meanings and insights.
There is no doubt that McCarty Hynes and Hynes-Berry’s model will continue to prove useful. However, in my arti- cle I have sought to surround it with new ideas and obser- vations from the field of literary studies and especially the phenomenology of reading, the scientific wonder at the reading experience.
The theories are only paradigms or philosophies but at the same time necessary ones. To be capable of correcting our own practices, it is necessary to stop and look at what has been lived and done – on what our own work with
reading is based, the kinds of reading methods we use and how. Furthermore, in terms of the common understanding of bibliotherapy, our field, and the development of its the- ory and practice, it is important to start to put this reading therapy process into words also in theoretical terms, and through this to forge links with those studying other artis- tic, creative and expressive culture in Finland, the Nordic countries and the rest of the world.
At the moment, research on reading is increasingly multidisciplinary and not only concerns literature research- ers and bibliotherapists. In the third and final part of the series, I present new multidisciplinary research on reading and therapeutic reading practices from the UK and Sweden in particular.
päivi kosonen is a docent in literary studies and a bibliother- apist.
This article is linked to research done in the project “Identity Work:
Narrative Agency, Metanarrativity and Bibiotherapy” (PI Mere- toja) which is part of the consortium “Instrumental Narratives:
The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative The- ory” (2018–2022), funded by the Academy of Finland (project number 314769).
Translation by Kate Lambert, Kääntämö Oy, Turku/Finland.
bibliography
Ahola, Suvi (2013). Lukupiirien aika. Yhteisöllistä lukemista suoma- laisissa lukupiireissä. Helsinki: Avain.
Auster, Paul & Coetzee, J. M. (2013). Tässä ja nyt. Kirjeitä ystävy- ydestä. Translated into Finnish by Erkki Jukarainen & Seppo Lopo- nen. Helsinki: Tammi.
Billington, Josie; Farrington, Grace; Lampropoulou, Sofia et al.
(2017). A comparative study of cognitive behavioural therapy and shared reading for chronic pain. Medical Humanities 43(3), pp.
155–165.
Bollas, Christopher (1992/1994). Being a Character. Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. London: Routledge.
Campbell, Jan (2009). Transformative Reading: Reconfigurations of the Self between Experience and the Text. In Hunt, Celia &
Sampson, Fiona (Eds.). The Self on the Page. Theory and Practice of Creative Writing in Personal Development. London & Philadel- phia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp. 164–180.
De Man, Paul (1979). Autobiography as De-facement. MLN, Vol.
94, December, pp. 919–930.
Felski, Rita (2009). Uses of Literature. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &
Sons.
Frid, Nina (2016). Läsa, läka, leva! Om läsfrämjande och bibliotera- pi. Stockholm: BTJ Förlag.
Herkman, Juha (2014). Lukemisen yhteisöllisyys ja muuttuva tietoy- mpäristö. In Inkinen, Tommi; Löytönen, Markku & Rutanen, Anne (Eds.). Kirja muuttuvassa tietoympäristössä. Helsinki: The Associa- tion of Finnish Non-fiction Writers, pp. 103–112.
Hustvedt, Siri (2009/2011). Vapiseva nainen. Hermojeni tarina.
Translated into Finnish by Kaisa Sivenius. Otava: Seven-pokkarit.
Ihanus, Juhani (2004). Litteratur och terapi. In Ihanus, Juhani (Ed.).
Att tiga eller att tala. Litteraturterapi – ett sätt att växa. Helsinki:
BTJ Kirjastopalvelu Oy, pp. 13–36.
Ihanus, Juhani (2009). Sanat että hoitaisimme: kirjallisuusterapia ja kertomukset. In Ihanus, Juhani (Ed.). Sanat että hoitaisimme. Tera-
peuttinen kirjoittaminen. Helsinki: Duodecim, pp. 13–48.
Iser, Wolfgang (1972/1974). The Implied Reader. Patterns of Com- munication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Johns Hop- kins University.
Iser, Wolfgang (1976/1978). The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aes- thetic Response. Johns Hopkins University.
Iser, Wolfgang (2000). Do I Write for an Audience. PMLA 115(3), May, pp. 310–314.
Kainulainen, Siru (2015a). Runon tuntu. Helsinki: Osuuskunta Poesia.
Kainulainen, Siru (2015b). Lukemisen vuorovaikutusta ei vielä tunneta. Editorial in the online magazine Kiiltomato on 11 August 2015. www.kiiltomato.net/lukemisen-vuorovaikutusta-ei-viela-tun- neta (17.2.2019)
Kivy, Peter (2006/2009). The Performance of Reading. An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Korhonen, Kuisma (2011). Lukijoiden yhteisö. Ystävyydestä, kans- anmurhista, itkevistä kivistä. Helsinki: Avain.
Kosonen, Päivi (2004). Pelosta ja liikkumattomuudesta. In Kosonen, Päivi. Elämisen taidosta. Esseitä modernin kirjallisuuden tunnoista.
Tampere: Tampere University Press, pp. 72–79.
Kostamo, Eila (1992). Haava. Flaubertin kuuntelua. Porvoo: WSOY.
Kähmi, Karoliina (2015). ’Kirjoittaminen on tie minuun, minusta sinuun.’ Ryhmämuotoinen kirjoittaminen ja metaforien merki- tys psykoosia sairastavien kirjallisuusterapiassa. Doctoral thesis.
Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Press.
Linnainmaa, Terhikki (2009). Reflektiivisyys ja refleksiivisyys kir- jallisuusterapiassa. In Ihanus, Juhani (Ed.). Sanat että hoitaisimme.
Terapeuttinen kirjoittaminen. Helsinki: Duodecim, pp. 49–69.
Macé, Marielle (2013). Ways of Reading, Modes of Being. New Lit- erary History 44(2): pp. 213–229. Translated by Marlon Jones.
Mazza, Nicholas (2003). Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
McCarty Hynes, Arleen & Hynes-Berry, Mary (1986/2012). Biblio/
Poetry Therapy. The Interactive Process: A Handbook. With a new introduction by Peggy Osna Heller. Third edition, revised and up- dated. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press of St. Cloud.
Meretoja, Hanna (2018). The Ethics of Storytelling. Narrative Her- meneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Pettersson, Torsten (2009). Att läsa för att utvecklas. In Nilsson Skans, Kersti & Pettersson, Torsten (Eds.). Litteratur som livskun- skap. Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på personlighetsutvecklande läsning. Gothenburg: Livrena, pp. 22–26.
Savolainen, Matti (2011). Retoriikka. Paul de Man. In Savolainen, Matti. Atlantin ylityksiä. Amerikkalaisen kirjallisuuden- ja kult- tuurintutkimuksen navigointia 1965–1995. Publication series of The Research Centre for Contemporary Culture 103. Jyväskylä: Univer- sity of Jyväskylä, pp. 21–42.
Sippola, Leena (2004). Läsning som en källa till psykisk hälsa. In Ihanus, Juhani (Ed.). Att tiga eller att tala. Litteraturterapi – ett sätt att växa. Helsinki: BTJ Kirjastopalvelu Oy, pp. 51–64.
Wahlfors, Laura (2013). Muusikon kumousliikkeet. Intiimin etiikkaa musiikin käytännöissä. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto.
Vainonen, Jyrki (2014). Kirjoittajan ja lukijan kävelyretket. In Vai- nonen, Jyrki. Askelia. Kirjoituksia kävelemisestä. Helsinki: Basam Books, pp. 79–92.
Paul Graves
Rhythm in Black & White:
helping l2 english writers hear and speak on the page
For ten years I have run a creative writing workshop as an advanced English language course for students at the University of Helsinki. I avoid lectures on language top- ics and focus instead on the language as a playing field where learners develop fluency and invest emotional depth in their L2 English. Workshop participants’ English is at level B2 or C1 on the CEF scale, and they have done some English academic writing. These learners from the various academic faculties, who have come for the writing or for a fresh way to work on their English skills, produce some very good fiction and poetry. Liberated from narrow aca- demic style, provided with opportunities for ambition and excellence, they discover joy here in doing the work.
The challenge is for the creative writer’s visible words alone to elicit powerful response or participation from the reader. Considering this goal in our discussions of craft, I find my L2 learners need more guidance on English rhythm from a writer’s perspective, so that they master norms and even go outside norms when they desire, with knowledge of how their writing might become audible from the page.
rhythm for writers
Detailed, concrete coverage of rhythm in writing pedagogy is often restricted to discussion of metrical verse. There, rhythm is recognized as a kind of distilled essence from spoken language or from prose. Textbook discussions of prose and free verse rhythm, on the other hand, offer few specifics beyond suggesting a contrast between short, chop- py sentences/lines and long, flowing ones.
Rhythm in literary language is a more integrated and con- crete whole than most descriptions allow for, and I believe the rhythm of speech as abstracted in writing, both in prose and poetry, should be viewed from a common base. Such a perspective is especially relevant when creative writing’s genre boundaries are as porous as they are now. The beat, the center of traditional descriptions of poetic rhythm; the breath, a much-disputed unit in discussing free verse; and grammatical rhythms, abstractions embodied in sound and essential to prose editing: these three rhythmical means are all at work in any spoken, or speakable, piece of language.
It may be true that native speakers need no schooling in the everyday rhythms of the language. According to Robert Pinsky,
Every speaker, intuitively and accurately, courses gracefully through subtle manipulations of sound. We not only in- dicate … where the accent is in a word like “question,”
but also preserve that accent while adding the difference between “Was that a question?” and “Yes, that was a ques- tion.” It is almost as if we sing to one another all day. (Pin- sky 1998, p. 3)
But the foundation for this intuitive grace comes through the experience of infancy, an extended time when the lan- guage washes over us and through us as a kind of music, as a set of patterns to which we gradually attach or match meanings. When we come to a second language later, even just a few years later in school, we meet it with emphasis on immediate denotational accuracy and structural con- sistency. We miss the experience of coming to the rational through the musical. Admittedly, our intuition is still at work, and learners who love their L2 dive into it and learn more than they are taught. These learners pick up much of the language’s sound on their own and may join native speakers in singing to one another.
In creative writing’s vast expressive range, we need a sure grasp of the language’s rhythmic identity. Robert Frost claimed that “the surest way to reach the [reader’s] heart is through the ear,” and essential to that goal is the writer’s ability to
…choose and arrange words in a sequence so as virtually to control the intonations and pauses of the reader’s voice.
By arrangement and choice of words . . . effects of humor, pathos, hysteria, anger, and in fact, all effects can be indi- cated. (Frost 2007, p. 301)
L2 writers have insufficient confidence in taking control of the voice by rhythmical means. When accessing and communicating emotion, even advanced L2 learners strug- gle with the different rhythmical identities of English and of their L1 language. This identity results partly from the uniqueness of each language’s features and partly from each
language’s speakers attending differently to these features.
For 9 of 10 learners in my workshop, the L1 is Finnish, a highly inflected language where syllables are perceived as relatively equal in length, where a doubled letter is heard as occurring twice, and where word stress always falls on the first syllable. Finnish also has far fewer small function words like the articles and prepositions of English. The two languages possess very different rhythmical features.
At university, Finnish students write academic texts in English; along the way, they meet English rhetorical de- vices with rhythmical consequences, such as end-focus. If these concepts catch their imagination, they may move to- wards hearing well-crafted sentences as balances of rhyth- mic chunks. But for many learners such concepts remain dry rulebook principles, and connections to the movement of thought go unheard. These learners should listen to how the visible flow of words across a page opens up to hearing an imagined oral version that can guide it. Creative writing uses this imagined oral rhythm more fully than academ- ic or professional writing. The narrator and all other voic- es in a literary text become distinctive individuals mainly through the differing flow of their words.
In a creative writing course, all the language’s expressive and communicative capacities are in play. Learners refresh their ideas of themselves as writers: they are nudged toward a voice of their own, toward using writing conventions not just to fit in, as they do in academic writing, but to make a distinctive sound. Ben Yagoda, in The Sound on the Page, speaks of this aim:
Anyone who puts pen to paper can have a prose style. In al- most every case, that style will be quiet, sometimes so quiet as to be detectable only by you, the writer. In the quiet, you can listen to your sound in various manifestations; then you can start to shape it and develop it. (Yagoda 2004, p. 241)
Yagoda elaborates on the “quiet” of this voice to remind us that the result, while always individual, need not make every writer stand out like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.
It was Woolf who wrote, “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm” (Woolf 1977, p. 247). She went on to suggest that rhythm “goes far deeper than words” and begins as a “wave in the mind”. In working with L2 creative writ- ers, I have come to agree with Woolf in equating style and rhythm; perhaps, though, she went too far in claiming that this equation makes style a simple matter.
what is linguistic rhythm?
In reviving the claim that style is rhythm, I need to clar- ify what I mean by rhythm. Linguistic rhythm, broad- ly defined, consists of perceived patterns that can repeat and vary, occurring mainly across time through auditory means. To grasp how it works, we should listen to a lin- guistic unit made up of smaller units: since rhythm is a pattern of repetition and variation across time, there must be a multiplicity within which it can occur.
If we begin with a sentence, we hear it delivered through a speaker’s action in time: it is a stream of sound and, si-
