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The extreme difficulty of deciding to try: Education for the creative self
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Dissertation
The extreme difficulty of deciding to try: Education for the creative self
2000
Overview
This dissertation explores the example offered by Willa Cather, in her ‘autobiographical’ novel The Song of the Lark, in tandem with the theory of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott as it links the importance of solitude with the creative individual's quietly monumental decision to decide to try—to begin to pursue, in a full way, a creative life—and the implications for pedagogical theory and practice. The Song of the Lark recounts the magical unveiling of one girl's creative self through a lifetime of re-emerging links to her childhood. The psychoanalytic theory of Winnicott provides the frame for this close reading of Cather's text. Winnicott's notion of living creatively is bound to a person's childhood by the way in which the human child discovers and learns to survive her world, and plays a pivotal role in the child's successful entry into a creative life. A life lived creatively is a healthy, ordinary life—one lived extraordinarily—and is not dependent upon the adoption of a vocation deemed ‘creative.’ Mark Freeman goes on to suggest that coincidence often benefits the life lived creatively, and Lather's story adopts this view as a principal theme. Cather's novel is an example that provides evidence of the components of experience that the creative self comes to rely upon, and the insight she allows into her own decision to try marks an important point of re-entry into theoretical implications in the education of artists. Otto concludes that the education of the creative self occurs outside the walls of educational institutions, left in large part to coincidence. Schools can encourage the development of the creative lives of their students, but only by making paradigmatic shifts in pedagogical theory and practice. Emphasis will have to shift away from learning alone and toward thinking. If children are not taught to value idle thought, the place of play and creativity, then a creative life will forever elude them. Finally, a conscious space must be made within schools for solitude and play, taking care to differentiate between the positive characteristics of solitude and the negative nature of isolation.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
ISBN
0493016929, 9780493016924
