The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

addressing the ‘anCient quarreL’

and a half ago, media theorist Tom o’Regan wrote, ‘Conferring and creating meaning
... is necessarily caught between individual enunciation and its social frame’ (1994:
337). our discussion of practice- led research in creative writing has been sited within a
contemporary intellectual and policy environment that is beginning to value creativity
for the contributions it can make to national economic as well as personal wellbeing,
and striving to find ways to describe, measure and evaluate the research outcomes from
creative practice- led research. Within such a context, creative writing’s most concrete
contribution to knowledge outside the boundaries of its own disciplinary practice
has been, arguably, in defamiliarizing the familiar (morley 2007), and thus inviting a
reflective engagement with what is – a move that has the potential to recast social and
global relationships, and contribute to changing attitudes, practices and policies.

Notes

1 of course this is too simple and reductive an assessment of plato’s position; we develop some
nuances of his argument later in this essay.
2 socrates refers to rhetoric as ‘a sort of art of leading souls by means of speeches’ (plato 1924:
phaedrus 261b).
3 ‘the poetry by the man of sound mind is obliterated by that of the madman’ (plato 1924: phaedrus
245a).
4 From the Vulgar latin, stantia, ‘a stanza of verse’, identified by the stop at the end of a set of lines
(from l. stans (gen. stantis), prp. of stare ‘to stand’).