Creativity In Language And Literature

Formulaicity is pervasive in both spoken and written language. Speakers use a huge amount of prefabricated language including collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions, and verbal creativity often involves combining established word sequences rather than inventing wholly new ones. In literature, formulaicity was long disparaged as the opposite of creativity, and a hallmark of ‘genre fiction’ of questionable aesthetic value, but a more recent approach sees all writing as intertextual – a tissue of citations and creative reworkings of other texts. The chapters in this book elucidate the nature of semi-fixed formulaic sequences; how the meaning of formulaic expressions can change over time; how readers interpret formulaic expressions in first and second languages; how modern and postmodern authors use traditional genres and tales to challenging effect; and how formulaic patterns involving particular words can underlie the texture and meanings of entire novels. Together, the contributions to this collection provide a convincing reassessment of the potential creativity of the formulaic in a variety of linguistic and literary contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

"Creativity in Language and Literature is a provocative and valuable book. Its breadth of topics, variety of approaches, and self-consciously creative and dialogic nature are especially appropriate and creative ways of approaching the subject of creativity. The scope, variety and original content of this book make it a unique contribution to the field" - Professor David L. Hoover, New York University, USA This unique resource brings together contributions from creative practitioners and academic researchers working across different disciplines. Researchers, literary authors, editors, performers and film makers reflect on their work and collectively explore the art of creativity in language and literature. Creativity in Language and Literature covers a range of texts, genres and practices, such as poetry, hip hop, film, story telling, web chat and pen-friend correspondence. Each part of the book begins with an introduction and the final part includes critical responses to the idea of linguistic creativity, encouraging ongoing dialogue and debate. This richly diverse collection is an ideal text for students and practitioners working at all levels. With contributions by Patience Agbabi, Daniel Allington, R. Amritavalli, Richard D. Brown, Lynne Cameron, Ronald Carter, Guy Cook, Jon Cook, Ruth Finnegan, Angela Goddard, Ben Haggarty, Graeme Harper, G. D. Jayalakshmi, Angel Lin, Janet Maybin, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Kate Pahl, Mario Petrucci, Rob Pope, Elena Semino, Fiona Sampson, Jane Spiro, Peter Stockwell, Joan Swann, S. Upendran and Michelene Wandor.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity provides an introduction to and survey of a wide range of perspectives on the relationship between language and creativity. Defining this complex and multifaceted field, this book introduces a conceptual framework through which the various definitions of language and creativity can be explored. Divided into four parts, it covers: different aspects of language and creativity, including dialogue, metaphor and humour literary creativity, including narrative and poetry multimodal and multimedia creativity, in areas such as music, graffiti and the internet creativity in language teaching and learning. With over 30 chapters written by a group of leading academics from around the world, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity will serve as an important reference for students and scholars in the fields of English language studies, applied linguistics, education, and communication studies.

Language and Creativity has become established as a pivotal text for courses in English Language, Linguistics and Literacy. Creativity in language has conventionally been regarded as the preserve of institutionalised discourses such as literature and advertising, and individual gifted minds. In this ground-breaking book, bestselling author Ronald Carter explores the idea that creativity, far from being simply a property of exceptional people, is an exceptional property of all people. Drawing on a range of real examples of everyday conversations and speech, from flatmates in a student house and families on holiday to psychotherapy sessions and chat-lines, the book argues that creativity is an all-pervasive feature of everyday language. Using close analysis of naturally occurring language, taken from a unique 5 million word corpus, Language and Creativity reveals that speakers commonly make meanings in a variety of creative ways, in a wide range of social contexts and for a diverse set of reasons. This Routledge Linguistics Classic is here reissued with a new preface from the author, covering a range of key topics from e-language and internet discourse to English language teaching and world Englishes. Language and Creativity continues to build on the previous theories of creativity, offering a radical contribution to linguistic, literary and cultural theory. A must for anyone interested in the creativity of our everyday speech.

Definitions of creativity, the nature of creativity, ways to creatively engage with children in and out of classroom, are some of the critical issues discussed in this collection of papers in an attempt to analyse and understand creativity inside and outside school contexts.

This volume gathers contributions in the closely linked fields of English language assessment and language education. The contributors from China and Hong Kong represent a mixture of established and new scholars. Areas covered in the language education section range across major developments in the redefining of Hong Kong’s secondary and tertiary curricula, as well as the huge field of China’s vocational education curriculum. Regarding assessment, the contributions reflect major changes in the marking of examinations in Hong Kong, whereby all examinations from 2012 onwards are marked onscreen, to quality control issues in the administration of China’s College English Test, which is taken by over 10 million candidates every year.

Discourse and Creativity examines the way different approaches to discourse analysis conceptualize the notion of creativity and address it analytically. It includes examples of studies of creativity from a variety of traditions and examines the following key areas, how people interpret and use discourse, the processes and practices of discourse production, discourse in modes other than written and spoken language, and the relationship between discourse and the technologies used to produce it. Discourse and Creativity combines a forward-thinking and interdisciplinary approach to the topic of creativity; this collection will be of great value to students and scholars in applied linguistics, stylistics, and communication studies.

Language, Literature and the Learner is an edited volume evolving from three international seminars devoted to the teaching of literature in a second or foreign language. The seminars explicitly addressed the interface between language and literature teaching to investigate the ways in which literature can be used as a resource for language growth at secondary, intermediate and upper-intermediate level. This book presents the reader with a practical classroom-based guide to how the teaching of language and literature, until recently seen as two distinct subjects within the English curriculum, can be used as mutually supportive resources within the classroom. Through essays and case studies it reports on the most recent developments in classroom practice and methodology and suggests ways in which the curriculum could be reshaped to take advantage of this integrated approach. The text will be essential reading for students undertaking PGCE, TESOL/MA, UCLES, CTEFLA, RSA and Teachers' Diploma courses worldwide. Students of applied linguistics, those on stylistics courses and undergraduates studying English language will welcome it as accessible supplementary reading.

This edited collection brings together papers by eminent scholars who attempt to demonstrate how challenges can most successfully be ameliorated with an eye to enhancing the effectiveness of the processes of language teaching and learning. In Part One, emphasis is placed on challenges that second language education has to face, both those more general, dealing with language policy issues, and those more specific, concerned with instructional options in the language classroom. Part Two focuses on challenges involved in researching the processes of teaching and learning in the second and foreign languages classroom, both with respect to research methodology and efforts to tap some variables impinging upon the effects of instruction. Finally, Part Three is devoted to challenges involved in second and foreign language teacher education, the quality of which to a large extent determines the outcomes of second language education in any educational context.

A state of the art critical review of research into literature in language education, of interest to teachers of English and modern foreign languages. Includes prompts and principles for those who wish to improve their own practice or to engage in projects or research in this area.

Renaissance Literature and Linguistic Creativity interrogates notions of linguistic creativity as presented in English literary texts of the late sixteenth century. It considers the reflections of Renaissance English writers upon the problem of how linguistic meaning is created in their work. The book achieves this consideration by placing its Renaissance authors in the context of the dominant conceptualisation of the thought-language relationship in the Western tradition: namely, that of 'introspection'. In taking this route, author James Harmer undertakes to provide a comprehensive overview of the notion of 'introspection' from classical times to the Renaissance, and demonstrates how complex and even strange this notion is often seen to be by thinkers and writers. Harmer also shows how poetry and literary discourse in general stands at the centre of the conceptual consideration of what linguistic thinking is. He then argues, through a range of close readings of Renaissance texts, that writers of the Shakespearean period increase the fragility of the notion of 'introspection' in such a way as to make the prospect of any systematic theory of meaning seem extremely remote. Embracing and exploring the possibility that thinking about meaning can only occur in the context of extreme cognitive and psychological limitation, these texts emerge as proponents of a human mind which is remarkably free in its linguistic nature; an irresistible mode of life unto itself. The final argumentative stratum of the book explores the implications of this approach for understanding the relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, and other kinds of critical activity. Texts discussed at length include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and shorter poetry, George Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and John Donne's Elegies.

Exploring Second Language Creative Writing continues the work of stabilizing the emerging Creative Writing (SL) discipline. In unique ways, each essay in this book seeks to redefine a tripartite relationship between language acquisition, literatures, and identity. All essays extend B.B. Kachru’s notion of “bilingual creativity” as an enculturated, shaped discourse (a mutation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Creative Writing (SL), a new subfield to emerge from Stylistics, extends David Hanauer’s Poetry as Research (2010); situating a suite of methodologies and interdisciplinary pedagogies, researchers in this book mobilize theories from Creativity Studies, TESOL, TETL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, and Literary Studies. Changing the relationship between L2 writers and canonized literary artefacts (from auratic to dialogic), each essay in this text is essentially Freirean; each chapter explores dynamic processes through which creative writing in a non-native language engages material and phenomenological modes toward linguistic pluricentricity and, indeed, emancipation.

This book borrows from a range of theories about creativity and about learning, while remaining largely practical in focus. It contains numerous examples for teachers of how to apply ideas about creativity in the classroom. In doing so, it attempts to maintain the subject's core identity while also keeping abreast of contemporary social, pedagogical and technological developments. The result is a refreshing challenge to some of the more mundane approaches to English teaching on offer in an age focussed excessively on standardisation and teaching to tests.

Teaching Creative Writing includes lively contributions from two dozen leading practitioners in the field. Topics addressed include history of Creative Writing, workshops, undergraduate, postgraduate, reflective activities, assessment, critical theory, and information technology.

A group of international top scientists from a diversity of disciplines sat together for five days with artists, designers, and entrepreneurs to develop a trans-disciplinary theory of creativity. Organic Creativity and the Physics Within assumes that creativity is a quality of nature visible in physics as well as in psychology, its basis being combinatorics, coincidence, complementarity, and fractal emergence. The authors prompt a mechanism cutting through particle physics, perception, psychology, and culminating into playfulness. Organic Creativity and the Physics Within connects us to the universality of nature's creativeness.

This volume is the first to focus on a particular complex of questions that have troubled Wittgenstein scholarship since its very beginnings. The authors re-examine Wittgenstein’s fundamental insights into the workings of human linguistic behaviour, its creative extensions and its philosophical capabilities, as well as his creative use of language. It offers insight into a variety of topics including painting, politics, literature, poetry, literary theory, mathematics, philosophy of language, aesthetics and philosophical methodology.