Contemporary Literary Advice in France. Adopting, Adapting and Transforming American Creative Writing Handbooks

American creative writing handbooks offer step-by-step programs on how to become a writer and how to write a good book. They provide definitions, formulas and techniques that appear to have universal legitimacy and that have proven very successful all the way into the twenty-first century. At the same time, however, they offer little historical perspective: they fail to situate their poetics within historical contexts and national literary traditions (Dawson, 2005; Wandor, 2008). Typically, they find inspiration in texts by a diverse set of writers — from Aristotle to Edgar Allan Poe and Georges Polti —, which they present as being part of the same body of knowledge about the universal rules of storytelling. Moreover, the U.S. creative writing handbooks justify their poetics of universality by pointing to the proven efficiency of these formulas on the literary marketplace. The rules are universal, so the handbook gospel goes, because they have withstood the test of time in managing to capture the readers' attention.In this dissertation, I investigate how the American creative writing handbook tradition, with its universalist claims, goes through changes when it enters into a European context with important local literary (advice) traditions. What happens when this body of concepts, formulas, ideas, techniques and representations (i.e. this poetics) shows up in a place that has its own deeply ingrained views on the process of writing and becoming a writer? How does this encounter between the apparently universal and the local play out? More specifically, I study the reception and transformation of the creative writing handbook in the context of literary advice in France today.

Publication year:2018

Accessibility:Open