Students becoming participant-observers in the Arthurian tradition

Can creative writing be a method of critical inquiry to read Arthurian texts? This is the challenge I issue to my students. For a decade, I taught Arthurian literature from the Mabinogion to Sir Thomas Malory’s Works, where students produced competent critical analyses with essays on topics such as legend, myth and history, gender studies, and the role of the otherworldly. I then paused and thought, how can I encourage the students to really think as critics of form? Not doing so in a department of budding writers, with most students on a creative writing pathway, struck me as an anomaly. I share here the methods I have been using and critically examine how to foster creative-critical exchanges, where the concepts and practices could be applied in medieval teaching beyond the Arthurian. The creative writing student cohort is accustomed to a learning space in which experimental risk-taking is encouraged through imaginative activity. This cohort also takes classes in critical analysis to learn how to read the craft of other authors to help inform their writing skills. What, though, if they learned the creative processes involved in medieval writing traditions by participating in them rather than being detached observers? Do, though, creative risks and imagination conflict with critical study, and is it possible to translate such merging of boundaries into learning practices? Simultaneously, could the critical studies cohort also benefit from exploring creativity more? Another way to position this query is to ask if imitation is the best form of flattery, how might learning-by-doing help both creative and critical students’ understanding of a genre’s features, a writer’s techniques, and of an editor’s role? After all, as Aristotle notes: “imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation” (Barnes, ed. 1944, 109).