Literature, Creativity and Language Awareness

This chapter attempts to disentangle evident relations between literature, language awareness and creativity. It provides some examples of the three being brought into fruitful dialogue in educational settings. These efforts at raising language awareness (LA) through pedagogy are loosely clustered in into ‘stylistics’ and ‘creative writing’ sections, with some overlaps also recorded. The chapter discusses LA promotion and potential in institutional terms, through uses of literature in education. It addresses paradoxes of teaching literature and creativity through advocacy of LA approaches to literary text, including those informed by stylistics, as well as the challenges and opportunities of creative writing classes and programmes. LA should direct attention to metalinguistics, bilingualism, multilingualism, problem-solving skills, and creativity. The chapter aims to submit the literary texts can both illustrate and prompt reflection as well as practice in all combinatorial, exploratory and transformational areas of creativity.