Proposal Title
"A Fraud in a Field of Language": Creative Authorship as Collaboration with the World
Proposal Type
Individual Presentation
Location
Olscamp 201: Rhetoric of Collaboration
Start Date
21-10-2017 11:15 AM
End Date
21-10-2017 12:30 PM
Abstract
This presentation will explore ways writers collaborate through their interactions with other people, the environment, and social media. It will then argue for expanding the definition of “reading” to one that moves beyond text and language, and encompasses any experience in an author’s life that inspires writing, giving us reason to interrogate, and perhaps redefine, the role of authorship itself.
"A Fraud in a Field of Language": Creative Authorship as Collaboration with the World
Olscamp 201: Rhetoric of Collaboration
This presentation will explore ways writers collaborate through their interactions with other people, the environment, and social media. It will then argue for expanding the definition of “reading” to one that moves beyond text and language, and encompasses any experience in an author’s life that inspires writing, giving us reason to interrogate, and perhaps redefine, the role of authorship itself.
Proposal
In his literacy narrative “Surrendering,” Ocean Vuong writes: “I had read books that weren’t books, and I had read them using everything but my eyes. From that invisible ‘reading,’ I had pressed my world onto paper. As such, I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer. I have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me.” Vuong amounts the experiences that influenced his writing to a kind of “plagiarism”; instead, I would liken it to a collaboration between the writer and his world. We all collaborate with our worlds this way: when an overheard piece of dialogue ends up in a story, when witnessing a fish swim inspires a poem, or a Facebook friend’s post causes your thoughts to drift in a direction that makes its way to paper—these are all forms of collaboration with our surroundings. This presentation will explore ways writers collaborate through their interactions with other people, the environment, and social media, and how those collaborations have shaped my own creative work. It will then argue for expanding the definition of “reading” to one that moves beyond text and language, and encompasses any experience in an author’s life that inspires and generates writing. The concept of “reading as a writer” then becomes an active collaboration, rather than just a tool one uses to improve craft. A larger understanding of idea-generating interactions as forms of collaboration give us reason to interrogate, and perhaps redefine, the role of authorship itself.