Writing Violence: the legal, moral and aesthetic Implications of creative non-fiction.

This essay began as a hybrid critical/creative paper that was presented as part of an all-female panel discussing the intersections between writing and extreme violence. My own paper was on the relationship between my creative nonfiction novel The Museum of Atheism and the real life murder of six-year-old beauty queen, JonBenet Ramsey. This essay is an attempt to represent the writing process of the creative nonfiction author, and to consider the ways in which critical theory can be used to highlight, or conversely obscure, fictional writing. In addition to considering the effect of using a real story, a true crime, as the basis for a semi-fictional work, this essay will also consider the relationship I had as a writer to my publisher, editor and agent, and their interventions in the writing process to ensure that facts were deliberately skewed or warped in order to avoid litigation. Finally, I will consider my own relationship to the material, and the impact that this had on the writing process.

Inside out and outside in. Thinking a Tagorean Future of Education.

Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas can still inspire education in the East as well as in the West today. In this paper, I survey Tagore’s philosophical anthropology and argue that there is more coherence to his philosophy and pedagogy than is usually seen. For Tagore, the highest goal is to make the world one’s own, as well as to enlarge one’s self to encompass the world. The educational practices through which this ideal can be reached can be classified as “creative action,” “love,” and “freedom.” On the basis of such an ideal, realms such as the arts, nature, and movement no longer remain expendable additions to the kind of knowledge-driven education that aims primarily at making everyone economically productive.One of the problems with such a pedagogical strategy is that it treats human beings as means and not as ends. Tagore’s educational approach (his “method of nature”) refrains from turning children into adults as soon as possible and accepts the deceleration of learning and the simplification of living asmost forward-leading approach to a successful and comprehensive education.

‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel.

While ‘community’ as a concept has come under increasing attack in a neoliberal era, it has remained in Scotland a mythic, though not unexamined, signifier of resistance to perceived threats to national identity. Community, central to the Scottish novel since the Kailyard, continues to be a prevalent theme in the many important novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored here. Yet, while often disturbingly oppressive in tenor, many of these representations of community actually attack the myth of Scottish communalism to critique, and often expose as forms of madness, the conventional values of social class, capitalism, patriarchy, and religion.

Community in Modern Scottish Literature.

Community in Modern Scottish Literature is the first book to examine representations and theories of community in Scottish writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across a broad range of authors and from various conceptual perspectives. The leading scholars in the field examine work in the novel, poetry, and drama, by key Scottish authors such as MacDiarmid, Kelman, and Galloway, as well as less well known writers. This includes postmodern and postcolonial readings, analysis of writing by gay and Gaelic authors, alongside theorists of community such as Nancy, Bauman, Delanty, Cohen, Blanchot, and Anderson. This book will unsettle and yet broaden traditional conceptions of community in Scotland and Scottish literature, suggesting a more plural idea of what community might be.

In search of community.

Community derives from the Latin root word communis (common), which itself breaks down into two possible derivations [...]. The first, com plus munis (what is indebted, bound, or obligated together), is thought to be more philologically accurate, while the second, com plus unus (what is together as one), carries the status of a folk- etymology.

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Impossible Community.

This chapter suggests two main related points. The overarching contention is that Hugh MacDiarmid was a poetic, political, polemical, and metaphysical impossibilist (rather than merely the extremist of caricature). More particularly, in an attempt to escape the impossible community of the Kailyard – provincial, retrogressive, Christian, Scotland-as-Brigadoon – MacDiarmid fashioned an equally impossible if conflicting community, profoundly singular yet ultimately spiritual, that nonetheless contained residual Kailyard archetypes. The argument is traced through examination of MacDiarmid’s attitude to the Kailyard; work relating to the small communities in which he lived and wrote, and to cities; and the question of his anti-Englishness.

Public feedback - but personal feedforward?

Academic feedback is taken here as the reporting to student writers of the strengths and weaknesses of their submitted draft work, while academic feedforward refers to constructive advice regarding possible strengthening of students’ next work. Both originate from a tutor’s initial judgement of a student’s work. Feedback and feedforward on work showing need for improvement are problematic in a Confucian Heritage Culture. Even gently constructive advice within a programme seeking evidence for assessment of critical thinking may lead to perception of hurtful criticism by Taiwanese students. Some could withdraw from class activity accordingly. So the writers adjusted their response style. They now choose between different approaches featuring tutorial feedback or feedforward, depending on the standard of work being judged. When individual postings feature poor critical thinking, the writers opt for private messages concentrating on constructive feedforward. For better postings, they provide positive feedback with reasons for their judgements, and summarise to the class these exemplars of generic strengths in critical thinking. They also offer private prompting when they see scope for further enrichment of an able student’s critical thinking. This might also be a useful practice when tutoring solely in the West. (192 words) Keywords: Confucian Heritage Culture, public feedback, private feedforward, assessment