That creativity is means of self-expression is a truism Romanticism bestowed on us. The slogan “Express yourself” can be heard in art and music classes from Pre-K on all the way to the college level, and it features equally prominently in guidebooks or on websites. We owe this understanding of the self that expresses its innermost feelings through artistic creation to a large degree to the Romantics. Contemporary sociologists find that, in the late 20th century, the possibility for expression grew into a relentless requirement to rely on creativity in constructing and reconstructing ever-changing, liquid identities (Reckwitz 2017; Bauman 2008; Sennett 2009). Reckwitz, in particular, draws a direct line from the Romantic ideal of the genius to the modern-day imperative to be creative in all aspects of life due to what he labels the "creativity dispositif". In this panel, we want to challenge such beliefs about modern-day identity construction by discussing relations between notions of self and creativity that run counter to the popularized legacy of the Romantic genius.
The first talk by Dr. Gundela Hachmann juxtaposes the need for providing an artistic self-construction with the need for including others and otherness in conceptions of creativity. She engages T.S. Eliot’s 1932 lectures The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism as well as Igor Stravinsky’s 1939 lectures Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons to show how a perceived need to describe the evolution of their artistic selves meets the impossibility to explain how this self is the source of or primary cause for creative activities. She argues that the artistic self remains elusive in these lectures and that the attempts to describe it ultimately point to an understanding of creativity that exceeds its limits. While Eliot insists on free and imaginative imitation of other poets as a cornerstone of his creative activity, Stravinsky defines art as work to be done, purposefully defamiliarizing the term to highlight the indebtedness to traditions and social contexts. As their narratives unfold dimension of otherness and othering, the self as the origin of creativity loses its contours.
In the second talk, Dr. Lyndsay Miller reads Vladimir Nabokov’s published non-fiction prose such as Speak Memory and Strong Opinions against the manuscripts of his Russian and English literary works and translations, as well as his unpublished letters. It argues that Nabokov uses these non-fiction works not to reflect the true state of his genetic creative processes, which differ from the processes he details in his creative output, but as an exercise in self-fashioning, which allowed him to throw off his previous authorial identity as V. Sirin, his Russian nom-de-plume, to become VN, the celebrated and canonized author of Lolita and Pale Fire. She argues that Nabokov purposefully crafted ‘public prose’, which serves the dual purpose of contextualizing Nabokov as an American writer, as well as allowing him to construct a fresh authorial identity in the wake of Lolita’s celebrity (Boyd, 601). Dr. Miller sees this most clearly in Strong Opinions, the interview collection for which Nabokov co-wrote questions and drafted answers over several correspondences, but also in his personal letters.
In the last presentation, Lynne Beckenstein probes notions of creativity as practiced in the Social Sciences. She challenges the common belief that sees creative writing as rational formalizations of the liberal subject’s mind at work. Instead, she argues that autotheoretical texts about the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) subvert generic conventions through meta-textual attention to the work of writing itself. Specifically, she reads Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Jackie Orr’s Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder as examples of DSM autotheory, which are structured around what she calls “counter-diagnostic metaphors” about the creative process. She finds in these works evidence for an illiberal aesthetic that imagines subjectivity as a fractal state, inapprehensible by the “predictive power” of the DSM’s categories, and eluding summary at the moment one tries to write it.
Dr. Hachmann concludes the session with a brief summary of Reckwitz’s critique of the “creativity dispositif”. Presenters and audience members get a chance to position the presented arguments vis-á-vis his theory and to collaboratively think about the value of broader notions of creativity.