The Art of English: Everyday creativity
Question:
According to Wilson, creativity in language is ‘influenced
and situated within a variety of salient contexts such as time, environment, culture and space’
(cited in Maybin and Swann, 2006, p 349).
Demonstrate the validity of this view of creativity and
discuss its significance.
The dynamics of everyday language creativity emerge
through the interactions between readers and writers, as
well as within the social, political and economic forces.
Creativity in language refers to the construction of
something original: something that did not exist before.
All communication is creative in creating something original
by using meaning-making resources from people’s previous
experiences and reconstruct them uniquely in combination of
particularities. Thus analysing texts alone to find
creativity is strictly limited, instead it is more effective
to study how people of different settings interact and
produce new texts by drawing out the inherent creativity in
these everyday literacy practices. It is only by looking at
these contexts that we can examine the dimension of culture,
society and history in defining creativity. The subsequent
discourse examines how language creativity is situated
and influenced by the contexts of time, environment,
culture and space. A further discussion examines the
significance of these contexts in defining
contemporary language creativity.
Creativity in language is influenced by the context of time.
The colossal social, economical and technological changes of
nineteenth century were inexorably significant in promoting
literacy which in turn influenced language creativity. Britain
had initially lagged behind its more advanced and literate
neighbours; it was only during the nineteenth century’s
industrial revolution that Britain became a literate society.
The technological developments of nineteenth century Britain:
the industrial revolution, the printing press and the railways
inevitably paved way for literacy. The economic landscape began
to change, many people left rural areas and moved into the
urban areas to work in factories. These new breed of manual
workers needed to read factory signs, notices and simple
instructions in operating the machines. Furthermore, the mass
printed materials (popular vernacular texts, broadsides,
postcards) produced by the printing press tense- has
made printed materials more affordable and easily available to
the majority and the railways also helped make frequent postal
services possible, thusencouraging expression-constant
literacy. Significantly, the State facilitated the progress
of literacy in making education compulsory. Without literacy
for the majority, language creativity would remain buried.
The newly literate having gained easy access to more
imaginative literature other than religious texts began to
develop fresh means of self expressions and creative language
expressions. The working class autobiography reveals the
creativity of its authors in several ways: in constructing an
identity for self-expression and in constructing a portrait of
self-development in an organized narrative to reflect their
interrelationship between self and the society despite their
little education and limited selection of materials.It was
during this specific period that most of the population in
Britain learned to read and write; thus with more
opportunities to practice their literacy skills; their
language creativity started to develop.
The context of an environment: its affordances versus its
limitations are highly instrumental in invigorating language
creativity. Affordances refer to the possibilities of
creativity offered by the available materials within the
environment. Besides the affordances, another concept
‘effectivities’ – determines the dynamic capabilities of
individuals who are able to exploit the affordances while
working within the limitations within of an environment.
Papen’s ethnographic research of the local literacies in
Namibia in the twentieth century (cited in Maybin and Swann,
2006,p. 350) demonstrates a convincing account of how
people manoeuvre affordances (opportunities) and limitations
(constraints) within an environment in their process of
developing language creativity.
The creativity of the people behind Face-To-Face Tours is an
excellent example of how creativity emerged within the
affordances and the ‘effectivities’ of its people. When
Simon and his friends first set up Face-To-Face Tours to
promote tours of Katutura township in Namibia they had no
idea what tourists would want to see. In creating their
poster, they need to consider the limitations of the
environment: limited resources for tourism discourse and
limited literacy in the English language. By exploiting the
limited available resources: referring to old school books,
talking to older inhabitants and relying on discourse
mediators and literacy they learned to deal with unfamiliar
text type(poster) in order to create an effective
advertisement. By using carefully selected words in their
advertisement ‘Experience Katutura’ (cited in Maybin
and Swann, 2006, p. 355) they demonstrated creativity by
focusing concisely on the ‘tourist gaze’: in conveying
Katutura as a place with colonial history and that the
tours were conducted by locals offering an authentic as
well as an exclusive individualized experience. Both the
affordances and limitations of an environment induce
individual’s ‘effectivities’ and the dynamics of these
elements provide the challenging landscape for language
creativity.
Language creativity is also embedded within the context of
cultural change. The ethnographic study of literacy
practices in Nepal (Ahearn, 1999)illustrates the effect of
social and cultural changes in the process of new literacy
practice that inevitably leads to language creativity.
Junigau, a rural community in Nepal of Tibeto-Burman ethnic
group, experienced rapid social and cultural changes in the
twentieth century. With the opening of the village’s first
high school in 1983, women, in particular gained greater
access to education. This opportunity to literacy and
education had significant impact on gender relations and
marriage practices in Junigan. Young couples began to
resist arranged marriages and started to engage in
courtship by writing; and by taking up love-letter
writing, they had unwittingly invented a new epistolary
genre as well as created a new form of prolonged courtship
previously unknown. Cultural change of courtship in Nepal
also led to the creation of new genre like the Romantic
booklets that offer guidance on how to write good love
letters.Young Nepalis write using a mixture of Nepali,
Hindi, Sanskrit and English words. In exploring available
resources, creativity stems from both old and new text types
and practices which resulted in the invention of new hybrid
genres through recontextualisation of words and phrases into
newer texts. Creativity here involved creation of new texts
or genres (love letters, romantic booklets) and new cultural
practices (courtship through love-letters as opposed to old
practices of arranged marriages). These newly created texts
helped young Nepalis to project their desired identities,
creatively. Language creativity emerges within these rapid
social and cultural changes.
Space here refers to the infinite opportunities of virtual
and mental space for generating language creativity.
Technology in the twentieth century has expanded the virtual
space for communication and language creativity.
Communication has now extended beyond geographical
boundaries, it is not longer restricted to a specific
community; instead, communication has evolved into a global
phenomenon. Strangers from any part of the world could
communicate with almost anyone with just a click on the
computer. There is no limit to language creativity in the
intertextuality of texts across cultures along with multiple
code-switchings and in the generating new hybrid genres
(visual medium, multi-modal medium) and infinite expressions.
Additionally, language creativity also exists in the
boundless possibilities of mental space. Wilson’s study of
prisoners’ creativity reveals how the struggles of adversity
and powerlessness can inspire language creativity (cited in
Maybin and Swann, 2006, p .340). Prison literacyies is
greatly restricted- confined to an institutional world in a
unsympathetic space. Creativity functions here as a vehicle
for maintaining mental sanity and a sense of identity. In
communicating, prisoners maintain a sense of self-directed
'self’ that is not merely subjected to other people’s desires
and rules. Prisoners draws upon both outside and inside way of
life for inspirations to maintain creativity. Within
constraints, some strategies for communication emerges: rap,
secret codes and poetry. Prisoners’ language creativity also
include intertextuality, for example:
The warden is my shepherd, I shall always want
(The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want)
(cited in Maybin and Swann, 2006, p. 346).
Prisoners find ingenious ways to maintain social interaction
and oral communication (to talk about court-cases, current
political situations or offer moral support). Though
physically disconnected from the ‘outer world’; prisoners use
their mental space creatively to reinventing language, play
with words and humour to continuously bind themselves to
their original sociocultural landscape.
(Part 2: The significance)
Language creativity is varied and complex. The creativity
demonstrated in Tour-to-Tour agency in Namibia illustrates
the situated nature of creativity. It shows that creativity
is contextual and what is creative in one context may be
conventional in another. Creativity is evident in how
Tour-to-Tour agency’s owners used new ideas, adapted and
changed to create a niche in Namibian tourism market. Their
creation of an identity of ‘indigenous’ local black guides
that were able to give an authentic experiences that white
guides cannot shows their creativity in adapting to the new
tourist discourse. Individuals’ enterprise is seen in the
way they interacted and collaborated: limited by lack of
experience or literacy, they needed to collate information
and talked to knowledgeable people.From this example, we
can see language creativity involves collaboration
(creativity is no longer an individual feat), in the styling
of identity, performance (the artful self presentation) ; and
the meaning-making processes of literacy practices to achieve
personal goals of social and economic needs. These display
their creativity in adapting to sociocultural forces and
changing discourses.
Language creativity has expanded itself to the complex
notion of heteroglossia, intertextuality, and dialogicality.
Language is heteroglossic-‘many-voiced’. The meaning of words
is derived from the ways they invoke different ideologies,
cultural movements and different social languages.
Intertextuality refers to the intertextual references
- producing both the intentions of previous speaker’s
intention and the speaker’s own meaning. Additionally,
dialogicality refers to backwards and forwards movement of
language – that utterance responds to both the previous
utterances while predicting their own utterance in
addressing to an implied audience. A word is saturated with
meanings associated with it from the past and fresh
reference of it is created by dialogic threads either by
echoing or challenging its meaning. This intrinsic responsive
and addressive impulses impact the forms and meanings and
hence stimulate language creativity. The contemporary sense
of language creativity is no longer restricted to poetics
and formal properties of language. The meaning of language
emerges from myriad connotations of words, diverse speaking
styles, language crossing, intertextuality and hybrid genres;
all these provide scope for change and creativity.
In the twentieth century, time has changed, and the
technological revolution provided other forms of everyday
creativity. The computer and the Internet also created new
discourses in a new sociocultural context: emails, chatrooms
and blogs. The ability to communicate over long distances
created a new sociocultural context: new relations between
strangers. Online chat provides the landscape for trying out
new identities by using language play and artful
self-dramatisation. The complexity of our communication is
now in multimodal and is no longer in merely writingwritten
text. New discourses are created with new styles, rules and
guidelines. Creativity here includes novel techniques for
dealing with novel situations in a different environment; and
it shows no limit to virtual space or mental space for their
capability in generating language creativity.
Defining contemporary language creativity exclusively through
the inherency model: (focusing only on the formal properties)
is stringently limited;, we need to move beyond it. Language
creativity is never static, rather it is constantly changed,
adapted, create, re-created and constantly in the ‘flow’. It
evolves with time: what is perceived as creative now will
change overtime and become ordinary. In the same manner,
what was historically considered creative may not be
accepted as creativity in contemporary sense. The recent
radical changes in contemporary literacy practices attest
to the constantly shifting social and cultural practices
and challenge the notion of a fixed system of creativity
achieved by the exceptional talent of rare individuals.
The Sociocultural model provides a new comprehensive
framework for analyzing language creativity within the
dynamic, contextualized processes of time, environment,
culture and space. Language creativity needs to be
assessed from various perspectives because it emerges
from different dimensions. Language creativity emerges
within everyday literacy -the way people interact, produce
and use literacy texts within the potential resources
(tools and technologies) and constraints of particular
contexts. The interactive features, technologies, literacy
and the creative possibility of different times and
different environments help in shaping language creativity.
Language creativity flows with time;, it changes, adapts
and revolutionises people’s way of speaking, writing, the
way they see the world and themselves. Creative dimensions
of literacy practices and the uses of rapidly changing
communication technology within the context of broader
sociological and historical processes impact creativity
in language. Language creativity is no longer an exclusive
romantic (individual)notion of creativity that takes place
in exceptional idealized moment of creativity; rather
contemporary language creativity is dynamic, complex,
multi-dimensional and contextual ( time, environment,
culture, space) and thus the sociocultural model is the
most comprehensive and proficient system in defining
language creativity.
(2094 words)
Bibliography
Maybin J., Swann J. The art of English: everyday creativity, The Open University, 2006
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