Abstract

I would like to discuss how the emergent area of Creative Writing in Australian universities might be situated in relation to what have become known as the New Humanities. The first question to ask is what are the New Humanities? The term was first used by Ian Donaldson at a symposium for the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989. Donaldson pointed out that in the previous few decades new modes of theoretical and methodological inquiry had contributed to a breakdown of the traditional divide between the humanities and the social sciences, between a refined liberal humanist world of the arts and a more rigorous analysis of society. The New Humanities, as he describes the work of research centres in America, are concerned with ‘reconfiguring knowledge... bringing together new combinations of scholarly and theoretical enquiry’ and ‘redrawing old taxonomies within the academy’.