Creativecritical manoeuvres: Carrying over, directing, figuring and going outside

Creativecritical approaches to writing – inside the academy and beyond – have proliferated in recent years, with varying stylistics and aims, such as opening new vistas of meaning or expression, resisting or challenging dominant subjects/subjectivities, bringing the political toward the personal, and explicating a journey in thought (commonly within academic research writing). The politics and poetics of creativecritical writing are experimental and transgressive, and as such, creativecritical writing resists taxonomy. Yet trends and patterns have emerged within this nascent field of writing. In this creativecritical essay, I argue that spatiality in language is a key principle of creativecritical writing. By activating and reflecting upon the “intentionality” (Brentano; Merleau-Ponty) of language through literary manoeuvres of carrying over, directing, figuring and going outside, this essay moves through scenes of writing to both argue for and demonstrate these manoeuvres in creativecritical practice. Drawing forward concepts of “performative writing” and its relationship to the real, this article builds upon recent research on the haptics/sensory within writing (Prendergast; Webb) and genre-transgressing writing styles (Mathews’s “relationality”; Gibbs’s “Live Writing”). In doing so, I present a lateral view of the contemporary scene of creativecritical writing and propose that spatiality – manoeuvring in critical “space” – is a key element of this form.