What is the hidden pain of creative writing? Behind its popularity, domestic universities are competing to offer creative writing majors | creativity | popularity

In 2009, Fudan University pioneered a master's degree program in creative writing aimed at cultivating literary writers among universities in Chinese Mainland. The Literature and Creative Writing Center of Shanghai University, established in the same year, is one of the earliest creative writing majors in domestic universities. This year is therefore considered the "first year" of creative writing in China, and since then, creative writing has rapidly developed in Chinese universities through disciplines, courses, or other forms. In April this year, nine universities including Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Fudan University, and East China Normal University jointly established the "China University Creative Writing Alliance" in Shanghai, promoting the sharing of university resources to support the construction of the creative writing discipline. This move has attracted attention from academia and society.

Shanghai is the "highland" of creative writing in China. On June 25th, the unveiling ceremony of the "Shanghai University China Creative Writing Research Institute" and the "2023 China Creative Writing Starting Again" Summit Forum were held at Shanghai University. He Jianming, Director of the Report Literature Committee of the China Writers Association and writer, was appointed as the Dean of the research institute. The "White Paper on Chinese Creative Writing" and the second "He Jianming China Creative Writing Award" invitation notice were also released on site.

The white paper proposes that due to its natural "interdisciplinary" nature and the "people-oriented" nature of "everyone can become a writer", creative writing has quickly participated in the construction of "new humanities" and the wave of national writing in the new era. However, as a new form of curriculum, writing philosophy, and talent cultivation model, creative writing actually emerged and practiced in China as early as 2009. The white paper attempts to comprehensively review the development status of creative writing discipline in China, explore the facts of localization and localization of creative writing, as well as the possibility of the creation of the "Chinese school" of creative writing.

Professor Xu Daojun from the School of Literature at Shanghai University stated that the white paper outlines the complete process of sinicizing creative writing, which is actually a process of thinking and starting again. It is a process of searching for academic theories to fill in gaps, and also a process of how the discipline will develop and position in the future. In the team's vision, the creative writing discipline has now basically completed the process from introduction to localization. In the future, it should participate more in the national cultural and creative industry and public cultural services, and also need to further promote literary creation into various fields of the times, exerting greater social influence of creative writing.

In domestic universities, it has become a consensus that Chinese language departments do not cultivate writers. He Jianming, who has worked for a long time in the Chinese Writers Association and multiple literary journals, has observed that many literary professionals from the Chinese department are not very good at writing articles. "I have been thinking about this phenomenon until I noticed the construction work of Shanghai University in creative writing, which coincides with my thoughts on whether the university can undertake the training of writers." "The emergence of creative writing has opened up the mechanism for introducing writers to campus teaching, but whether it can cultivate a new generation of writers and more and more well-known writers depends on whether teaching thinking is synchronized with innovation." He Jianming said that he has always held the desire to cultivate emerging writing talents, especially "having a dream of creating a peak in contemporary literature in Shanghai." The more than ten-year intersection with the creative writing discipline of Shanghai University has witnessed the development process of this discipline from its inception to its growth. He gave up his salary and invested all of his time in the construction and development of the creative writing discipline when he joined Shanghai University this time.

He Jianming raised a further question on site: Can the word "research" in "China Creative Writing Research Institute" be removed one day? This question touches on the hidden pain of creative writing. Liu Xuguang, Dean of the School of Literature at Shanghai University, told reporters that the discipline of creative writing has caught up with the "new liberal arts" fast train that serves the times and society, and has developed rapidly. However, the legitimacy of its discipline has not been fully resolved. "There is no 'creative writing' in the traditional Chinese subject directory, and 'creative writing' can only be affiliated with other disciplines. Some universities have established their own secondary discipline points that belong to modern and contemporary literature, but the research paradigm of creative writing is not completely consistent with modern and contemporary literature. Whether to remove the word 'research' from the 'creative writing research institute' is related to another question. 'Can students majoring in creative writing obtain degrees through creative practice achievements? Except for a few universities, most creative writing master's programs are still academic master's degrees.'"

In He Jianming's view, teaching creative writing cannot be "from theory to theory". Liu Xuguang believes that good creative writers should be able to write on their own and teach others how to write. He introduced that Shanghai University will offer a creative writing specialty class among undergraduate Chinese language and literature students, attempting to integrate creative writing into undergraduate education.

In the afternoon of that day, the "2023 China Creative Writing Starting Again" Summit Forum opened, which was divided into two halves. The attending experts discussed topics such as expanding the new realm of urban writing in Shanghai in the new era, writing poetics and writer research from the perspective of creative writing, connecting education, and creative writing between society and the world.