Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003) 343

Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 328 pp.

Written by a sociologist using "group theory" to explore the workings of circles—circles of writers, artists, social reformers, and others—this study argues that creativity is not a result of isolation and individuation or even of simple collaboration. The dynamics of peer groups (their formation, development, and decline) and of collective creativity are documented in cases ranging from the French Impressionists to Freud's psychoanalytic circle to the women who led the drive for women's rights in America in the 1850s. Not a compelling storyteller (despite fascinating stories here to be told), Farrell deploys a comparative method that results in considerable repetition. Nevertheless, the cumulative impact of reading about the various examples from which the model was drawn is to convince the reader of the benefits (and occasionally the perils) of collaboration.

 

—Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon, president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1999-2000, is University Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the author or coauthor of, among many other books, Opera: Desire, Disease, Death; Bodily Charm: Living Opera; The Politics of Postmodernism; Irony's Edge; and Splitting Images.