‘WRITING IS PHYSICAL TOO’: EXPLORATIONS OF WRITING AS AN EMBODIED ACT

Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction

‘WRITING IS PHYSICAL TOO’: EXPLORATIONS OF WRITING AS AN EMBODIED ACT

Lisa Maria Clughen

Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, England

Scholars from a range of disciplines ­ from linguistics to neuroscience, from education to Sports and Leisure – argue for the centrality of the body to effective learning environments. How, though, might the body relate to writing? This question has been the focus of my recent research (Clughen 2015, forthcoming), where I have explored the primacy of the body to writing, such that we might conceive of writing itself as an embodied act.

My research is situated within my own disciplinary context of literary and feminist theory, but works alongside that of writing theorists, such as Peter Elbow, who are alarmed by the alienation of the body from literacy cultures, an absence so alarming that, to some, it may even appear that there is ‘a plot against (…) the human body’ (Elbow 2012: 6­7). Drawing mainly on feminist theories of the body and with reference to a series of writers from Virginia Woolf and Kierkegaard to Martin Amis and David Almond, I will welcome the body in this session and, with some urgency, argue that embracing the body is crucial for creating empowering environments for writing support. With ‘the body in mind’, in the second part of this session, I shall encourage discussions of the ways in which writing might relate to the body. Participants will be invited to explore the notion of writing as physical by considering their own experiences of writing and writing support; we will ask how different writing theories and disciplinary perspectives might contribute to our explorations; consider what ‘embodied writing’ might look like and debate the issues involved with its promotion within conventional academic writing cultures; finally, we will debate the implications of this perspective for an ‘embodied writing support’. ​ The main intention, then, is to theorise the idea that writing is an embodied act and to stimulate creative ideas about how the burgeoning field of ‘embodied writing support’ can be developed. Given the often hidden status of the body in writing cultures, the paper essentially asks that we foreground it as we examine our attitudes, values and beliefs towards writing and as we develop our writing pedagogies.

References

Clughen, L. (2015, forthcoming) ‘Embodied writing support’: the Importance of the Body in Engaging Students with Writing’. ​ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice​ , Bristol: Intellect

Elbow, P. (2012) ​ Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing. ​ Oxford: Oxford University Press.