This seminar will bring together two researchers currently working at the intersection between creative writing, research and pedagogy in English. Sara Greaves and Helen Mundler will share their experiences navigating between two cultures pertaining to the way creative writing interacts with knowledge production, and also how this plays out in the classroom, and in the academic institution generally. Interweaving with their own creative processes and productions, they will explore how intuition, embodiment, language play, within one language and between languages, articulate in both fiction and poetry in English in a foreign language context.

Title: ‘Language Learning and the Mother Tongue: Putting Poetry in the Picture.’ (Sara Greaves)

Abstract: This paper will ponder the interplay between interdisciplinary research in the field of language learning and the Mother tongue and poetry-writing practice and teaching. The collective book currently in press, edited by Monique De Mattia-Viviès and myself, Language Learning and the Mother Tongue : Multidisciplinary Perspectives, published by Cambridge University Press, with chapters by Boris Cyrulnik, Monique De Mattia-Viviès, Nathalie Enkelaar, Alain Fleischer, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Sara Greaves, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Yoann Loisel, Marie Rose Moro and Rahmeth Radjack, resulted from an action research project in a medical centre and long years of teaching and research in an English studies department (grammar, linguistics, literature, poetry, translation, creative writing). My own and my students’ ‘language biography’ poems will be discussed in the light of some of the theoretical concepts expounded in the book, such as the (M)other tongue, the bilingual overlap, the plurilingual skin-voice or transmission aporia. In turn these concepts give rise to creative writing exercises based on poems by transcultural poets to improve second language acquisition in a creative pedagogy designed to personalise the second language and anchor it in the body.
The spirality inherent in this method draws on poetry-writing, a practice that in my own biography pre-dated both research and teaching. Yet in my published research, that practice is largely out of the picture. This paper will be an attempt to remedy that absence.

Biography : Sara Greaves is Associate Professor in poetry, translation studies and creative writing at Aix-Marseille University. In 2008 she took a D.U. in facilitating creative writing workshops, and began developing the creative pedagogy that comprises a major part of her lecturing practice today: Creative translation, Multilingual creative writing workshops, Self-translation and Transcultural poetry : criticism and creation. She has published Côté guerre côté jardin : excursions dans la poésie de James Fenton, Presses universitaires de Provence, 2016 (poetry translations and a monography). She leads a LERMA research group called Language and speech from disorder to therapy and is head of the ECMA Master’s degree. She won the Prix Orpheuspoetry prize, awarded by Anagrammes Editions in 2011 for an unpublished collection of poetry entitled Lifelines, and has published four poems in a Cypriot journal, Cadences: a multilingual journal on the literature and the arts of Cyprus, published by the European University in 2015.

Title: “Research into writing, writing into research: the space between.” (Helen Mundler)

Abstract: This paper will explore the crossover between two threads that have run through years – literary research, and creative writing – and a more recent addition, the teaching of creative writing. Arguably, this is a line of investigation which is specific to the French university context: in the Anglo-Saxon world, no “back-up” of critical practice is required for the creative writing professor. However, Sara Greaves and I have concluded, in our recent work on defining ways of taking creative writing studies on in the French university context, that this specificity of the French context can be considered felicitous. Far from being limiting, it may even be enriching.
This view chimes with my own experience as a literary researcher and writer of fiction. My contention has always been that it is possible and desirable to work out the same questions in criticism and creative writing, thus creating a space of overlap between these two different, but complementary, forms.
Two questions will be addressed. Firstly, as part of an ongoing reflective process on the development of creative writing in English studies in France, I will show how I have worked out the relationship between literary research and creative writing over the past few years. I will discuss starting out from an intuition in my creative practice, and working from that, by means of literary and psychoanalytical theory, towards a position in which creative and critical practices feed into one another. Secondly, I will show how I have added a teaching project for creative writing into the mix, one which stems both from my research on A.S. Byatt and from offshoots of that research within my own creative practice.

 Biography:  Helen E. Mundler is Associate Professor in English Studies (maître de conférences HDR, 11^esection) at l’UPEC (Université Paris-Est Créteil). She obtained a first-class degree from Durham in 1992, an M Phil from Strathclyde in 1994, a PhD in Strasbourg in 1998, and an Habilitation (higher doctorate) in Nanterre in 2014. She works on a range of contemporary fiction, and has published books on A.S. Byatt (Harmattan, 2003) and Liz Jensen (Boydell and Brewer, 2016). Her book on rewritings of the Noah myth will be published by Boydell and Brewer later in 2022. She also gives papers and publishes articles regularly. Recently she has become interested in the development of creative writing in English in French universities. As a writer herself, she has published three novels, Homesickness (Dewi Lewis, 2003), L’Anglaise (Holland House, 2018) and Three Days by the Sea (Holland House, 2022). She has also published and broadcast a few short stories, and was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize (Ireland) in 2018.

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