Date of Completion
4-17-2018
Embargo Period
4-15-2025
Keywords
creativity, innovation, writing, composition, rhetoric, pedagogy, materiality, sociality, extratextuality, error
Major Advisor
Thomas Deans
Associate Advisor
Brenda Brueggemann
Associate Advisor
Dwight Codr
Associate Advisor
Christopher Vials
Field of Study
English
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Open Access
Open Access
Abstract
Creativity, innovation, disruption, and other such concepts have become central to much scholarly and popular literature on economics, entrepreneurship, and management. Other influential discourses—psychology, urban design, and higher education policy—have followed suit, taking a similar interest in these concepts. As a result, creativity has ascended to the status of something like a core cultural value—ubiquitous, always referred to positively, but frequently stripped of any specific meaning, or else understood in narrowly individualist and economic terms. With signs of “creativity creep” now appearing in composition studies, my dissertation examines other disciplines’ scholarship on creativity and related concepts and considers how creativity might function usefully and ethically in composition studies. I find that, under close scrutiny, individualist and economic views of creativity (like the artist in the garret or the technocrat in the garage) fail to pass muster; they don’t do justice to the complexity of creative processes and productions. In reality, creativity—especially in writing—always involves collaborative, networked, highly socially and materially mediated processes of production, circulation, and reception.
Recommended Citation
Piller, Erick, "Invention in the Age of Innovation: Writing Studies, Creativity, and Social Change" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1809.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/1809