ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the emergence of the sub-field called ‘creative criticism’ within the discipline of English Studies in UK universities. Arguing that the term in fact covers a heterogeneous range of practices, it identifies three main kinds, and limns the histories of each, before homing in on one specific type. This is ‘creative criticism’ conceived as formally inventive critical writing, and, as the essay argues, it is indebted inter alia to the experimental critical-theoretical writings of Derrida. The polemical turn of the essay takes up this lineage in order at once to argue for the liaison between formal invention and critical thought, and to repudiate some of the claims made by post-critics about deconstruction as a mere ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ The essay concludes by abstracting from close reading of a particular contemporary instance of creative critical writing, Sarah Wood’s ‘Try Thinking As If Perhaps,’ a set of notes towards a manifesto for future creative criticism.
