| dc.description.abstract | Interdisciplinary scholarship from creative writers and rhetoric-composition scholars and teachers has long set the stage for blending the concerns and practices of creative writing and rhetoric-composition in order to conceptually and pragmatically reinvent the study and teaching of writing (Bishop, T. R. Johnson, Newkirk, Hesse). My dissertation responds to calls for a jointly rhetoric and poetic approach to composition pedagogy by asking how instructional creative writing texts introduce students to tacit, emotional, and often unconscious aspects of the creative process, such as inspiration. Though rhetoric-composition scholarship heavily discusses and theorizes invention, discourse on tacit, quasi-mystical subjects such as inspiration remains sparse.^Melding rhetoric-composition scholarship on invention (Flower and Hayes, LeFevre, Rickert, Micciche) with analysis of twenty assigned texts from a survey of undergraduate introductory creative writing classes and psychological research, I revisit conversations about the bodys conscious and unconscious role in composing to open inspiration for overt study and share strategies that nurture and trigger inspiration. This dissertation demystifies inspiration by examining the historical narratives, economic concern, and academic skepticism that relegate inspiration to mysticism. Demystifying inspiration collapses Cartesian divisions between inspiration and invention that distinguish them as separate but complementary processes. I pose an alternate definition of inspiration that highlights creativitys situational, emotional, and embodied nature, and I use the instructional creative writing texts in my study to offer strategies that nurture and trigger inspiration.^Creative writing and rhetoric-composition pedagogy share history and interdependency (Walker, Myers). The instructional creative writing texts in my study frame shared invention strategies from modern and ancient times (ritual, freewriting, journaling, imitation, writing prompts, the Ciceronian topoi, and the Dissoi Logoi) with metaphors and anecdotes that explain how systematic invention practices nurture and trigger inspiration. As a result, my study proposes opportunities to adapt current and classical rhetorical invention strategies to facilitate inspiration in first- and second-year composition classrooms. Overall, my dissertation demonstrates the productive power of interdisciplinary partnership between rhetoric-composition and creative writing and provides strategies for applying that partnership to the study and teaching of inspiration. | |
