Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur

Critique as Care, or: What the Patterns of Attachment of the Creative Writing Workshop Teach Us About Being Good (Enough) Readers
This article makes the claim that reading in the creative writing workshop is governed by three overall patterns of attachment: A de- scriptive, an affective, and a creative pattern. Together, these aesthetic styles of attachment constitute a caring practice of reading that
is unique to the creative writing workshop. Building on postcritical literary theory and
a case study of a shared reading from The Danish Academy of Creative Writing, I show how each pattern of attachment connects
to the readers’ different ways of identifying with fictional characters. Inspired by these findings, the article concludes by proposing an alternative analytical position that stands in contrast to critique’s ideal of the skeptical, all-knowing critic: The good enough reader. The ideal of the good enough reader, I argue, is of both theoretical, methodological and didactic relevance to literary studies and the pedagogical practice of creative writing.