CCWP03: Creative Process: Theories and Cases

The Greek philosopher Plato envisioned the artistic creator as a person possessed by madness, and wide-ranging opinions about the meaning of creativity have flourished ever since. The Florentine biographer Vasari, the English poet Coleridge, and later thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and psychoanalysts Freud and Winnicott, have been among those who have contributed to a rich documentary, poetic, and theoretical literature about creativity. This module will make a partial tour through some of these writings, and it will link them with selected cases of creative work in the fields of literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, science, and games. Our goal in this module is to engage with some of the best philosophical minds on the idea of creativity, and to do so by attending closely to created objects and the people who make them. As a writing course, "Creative Process" itself emphasises the process of creating new ideas in written form, in essays, through close reading and study of textual and other forms of evidence.