ENG 3014-01 Spring 2024

What constitutes creativity? How do we recognize or generate it? Is it a good, always good? Is it the core of our professional and social desire? What does it mean to be a creative thinker? Can you be a creative reader? We can say that the answer is obvious, but what if we pursue the question, in fact , what does it mean “to read.” When the professor asks you if you read the assignment for the day, and you respond, “yes,” what do you mean? Does you mean that you have taken extensive notes, or that you looked at some pages, or just opened the book, or is it just blah-blah, a ploy, just a way to deflect the question so that the professor will go on to something or somebody else. That is, is some reading fakery? That is, are we functioning on what we might call an elementary level of reading. Is that creative? That is, has your reading changed you? Does all reading change you? Henri Bergson saw creativity as part of the evolutionary cycle in Creative Evolution and The Creative Mind, and so central to the human species. For Gilles Deleuze, “Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" Further: Philosophy is not communicative, any more than it is contemplative and reflective: it is creative or even revolutionary, by nature, in that it is ceaselessly creating new concepts. The only condition is that these should have a necessity, as well as a strangeness, and they have both to the extent they respond to real problems. Concepts are what stops thought being mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip.” (Deleuze, 1995: 136) So we ask, “What is a creative act?” But we must immediately add, where do we go to search out an answer?