Cogent Arts & Humanities

Writing in A Cage: Creativity Under Structural, Political, Religious Constraints

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "Writing in A Cage: Creativity Under Structural, Political, Religious Constraints".

Since the Romantic era, freedom has been regarded as an essential condition of creativity. However, literary history reveals that a broad array of restraints (both self-imposed and involuntarily endured) has always shaped literary production. Creative freedom is never absolute but is rather a Romantic myth. While a writer’s boundless imagination can conceive of literally anything, the materialization of the original idea inevitably collides with a complex set of literary and extraliterary boundaries. The separation of “constraint” as “a superior form of freedom” from cliché-like “convention” (Jan Baetens, Jean-Jacques Poucel) dismantles the Romantic opposition between restriction and freedom but introduces a new polarity: “good” liberating constraints vs “bad” automatizing conventions. Keeping in mind that this discussion is usually associated with the French Oulipo (Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais) this collection seeks to draw a broader parallel between institutionalized literary conventions and broader socio-political, cultural or religious restrictions.

How does the hyper-intensification of textual structures restore genuine agency to writers operating under both aesthetic conventions and ideological restrictions that function as similar normalizing mechanisms? Such literary conventions cannot be reduced to purely literary petrification, as they are structurally determined by political, cultural, religious and socio-economic conditions. Both ideological clichés and literary conventions function as cognitive frames. They provide prefabricated frameworks that allow writers to construct meaning that is instantly familiar to a broad audience without expending the effort required to create entirely unique imagery. While there is a crucial distinction regarding the existential and ethical stakes of these pressures, when viewed through the lens of textual production, these normalizing forces lead to similar structural outputs. Whether navigating a chosen linguistic lipogram or challenging an involuntary ideological red line, the writer is forced to reject a transparent and passive mode of writing.

All forms of institutionalised restrictions can be viewed not merely as forces that conventionalize or silence literature, but as mechanisms that inadvertently catalyze entirely new formal innovations that function as vehicles of “defamiliarization” (Shklovsky) and “deautomatization” (Mukařovský, Deikman). Censorship and political restriction, while oppressive, have historically forced writers to become hyper-creative. Contributors are encouraged to address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do self-imposed formal rules (for example, in Oulipian writings, Western haiku, constrained writing novels such as Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser) rescue the writer from the hidden constraints of literary conventions?
• How can true creative agency be achieved through a hyper-conscious struggle against these dogmas?
• How does political censorship force writers to invent complex styles to bypass forbidden topics (for example, Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams with its minimalist claustrophobic style)?
• How do authors writing under strict religious censorship use encoded formal innovations to subvert dogmatic “red lines” (for example, Rabelais’s anticlericalism and grotesque realism)?

Meet the Guest Advisor

Dr. Natalia Morzhenkova is a Professor of the College of Foreign Languages, Huaqiao University (China). Her research examines the intersection of modernist literature, visual arts, and philosophy. Her recent works have been published in Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Journal of Intercultural Communication & Interactions Research, New Literary Observer.

The Guest Advisors declare no conflict of interest regarding this work.