I’ve added a new page in the resources section about Philip Hefner’s concept of human beings as “created co-creators.” I was trying to collate all the related material for a thesis chapter into one place and I hadn’t seen a similar collection online anywhere. So I’ve made an outline of the concept with a couple of bibliographies attached.
The bibliographies are more of a sample selection than the definitive list, but now I have a place to refer people to when they ask for more information about the metaphor. Within my own work I take Hefner’s concept and rework it, so it’s useful for me to have it around too.
See The Created Co-Creator resource page.
ConradGempf
I’m pretty sure one of the Inklings wrote about human beings as little creators — thinking more in terms of creating worlds and characters. I was going to wait to write till I found the reference, but things are pretty frantic here for the rest of June at least and I’ll forget. First place I’d look would be Tolkien’s essay in _Essays Presented to Charles Williams_. If looking there wasn’t productive, I’d be hunting and pecking through my shelves.
Stephen
Thanks for that, Conrad. I’d forgotten about the whole “sub-creation” thing that Tolkien articulated in “On Fairy Stories”. I’ll find my copy on the bookshelf. The ideas there would work well in the introduction to my chapter on co-creation.
Now I think about it, I remember the Kiwi comic book writer Dylan Horrocks used it in an essay of his I read a while back.
http://www.hicksville.co.nz/PerfectPlanet.htm
(Scroll down to the part about “World-Building”)
Horrocks writes,
Tolkien even asserted that there is no higher function for man than the “sub-creation” of a Secondary World. It was, in fact, a religious act: