Creative Writing as a Communicative Act : An Artistic Method

With Habermas' theory of communicative action as the starting point, a theoretical model is devised to investigate the act of creative writing as formulated in interviews made with students and teachers on a university study program me in creative writing. This article explores writers' work procedures in a communicative network of institutional and everyday practices, in the light of established notions of literature and authors. In the informants' references to their own writing, the metaphor of 'space' - specifically, how an 'inner' creative space interacts with an 'outer' public one - is crucial. This metaphor applies to several levels of communicative action: individual, institutional, public and textual. Owing to its limited length, this article comments solely on the individual and institutional levels.