Mark McGurl writes in this 2011 book:
…the creative writing program produces… a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society.
…Postwar American literature provides endless testimony, for starters, of the agonizing importance of the institution of the family in making us who we are—and the school picks up where the family leaves off.
…Conceived…in the firmament of early twentieth century progressive educational reform, creative writing is surely one of the purest expressions of that movement’s abiding concern for student enrichment through autonomous self-creation. What could be further from the dictates of rote learning, or studying for a standardized test, than using one’s imagination to invent a story or write a poem?
…once Nabokov had his lectures written, he delivered them year after year, never changing the syllabus and making no pretense of taking any interest in his students (Thomas Pynchon famously among them) as individuals.
…the modern university is predicated on the values of the Enlightenment, on the attempt … to trade our childish enchantments for valid knowledge, including knowledge
of the ways and means of enchantment.…Although literary studies [are] built upon a foundation of awe…
…Nabokov was not much of an intellectual, if by that term we mean someone profoundly interested in the conflict of literary and cultural ideas. If it is easy to mistake him for one, it is because he was such a theatrical holder of opinions…vamping performances of judgment…
…the fantasy [in] the democratic United States, …”every man is a king.” [That] fits… into the progressive school’s commitment to enhancing students’ self-esteem. It’s good to be king (or queen); and to recover one’s throne in the enchanted realm of one’s own writing…
…the “reflexive accumulation” of corporations which pay more and more attention to their own management practices and organizational structures, down to the self-monitoring of individuals who understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists. It would be absurd to deny the large payoff to individuals living in the inherently pluralistic conditions of reflexive modernity, who are vested with a thrilling panoply of choices about how they will live their lives.
…modern people “are condemned to individualization.” To be subject to reflexive modernity is to feel a “compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging” of a biography and… for the obsessive “reading” of that biography even as it is being written.
…since the nineteenth century texts have been considered “literary” to the degree that their value does not seem reducible to the information they convey…
…Dean MacCannell long ago described the world of the experience economy as one of generalized tourism, a world in which the “value of such things as programs, trips, courses,
reports, articles, shows, conferences, parades, opinions, events, sights, spectacles, scenes and situations of modernity is not determined by the amount of labor required for their production. Their value is a function of the quality and quantity of experience they promise.”…the tourist pays simply to be in a certain place but hedges the immateriality of his experience by taking pictures and purchasing durable souvenirs.
…Taking a vacation from the usual grind, the undergraduate writer becomes a kind of internal tourist voyaging on a sea of personal memories and trenchant observations of her social environment, converting them, via the detour of craft and imagination, into stories. By contrast, to read and analyze a novel in a regular literature class is
to turn around and head back toward the workplace—back, that is, toward the submissiveness of homework.…In creative writing more than any other subject, it can seem that the teacher is grading a person, not a paper…
…the most reliable source of negativity in the graduate workshop is no doubt other students—the competition—not the teacher. The teacher knows that for the vast majority of her charges the M.F.A. will not in fact function as a professional degree leading to a job but rather as a costly extension of their liberal education. In this sense it is
a prolongation of the “college experience,” an all-too-brief period when the student is validated as a creative person and given temporary cover, by virtue of his student status, from the classic complaint of middle-class parents that their would-be artist children are being frivolous.…the university has… become perhaps the most important patron of artistically ambitious literary practice in the United States, the sine qua non of countless careers.
…as of 2004 there were more than 350 creative writing programs in the United States, all of them staffed by practicing writers, most of whom, by now, are themselves holders of an advanced degree in creative writing. (If one includes undergraduate degree programs, that number soars to 720.)
…the rise of the creative writing program has been entirely ignored in interpretive studies of postwar literature. Discussion of the writer’s relation to the university has instead largely been confined to the domain of literary journalism, and to the question of whether the rise of the writing program has been good or bad for American writing… Published to considerable fanfare in Harper’s Magazine in 1989, Tom Wolfe’s “manifesto” for a new social realism, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” is perhaps the most notorious of these critiques, complaining of “writers in the university writing programs” who in “long, phenomenological discussions” have “decided that the act of writing
words on a page [is the] real thing and the so-called real world of America” is the fiction.42 In place of this effete and tedious navel-gazing, Wolfe would have writers return to the robust example of nineteenth-century literary naturalism, where the practices of novel writing partially converged with those of investigative journalism.…Demonstrating the continuing appeal of the romantic conception of the artist as an original genius, “assembly-line” writing programs are blamed by [John W.] Aldridge for producing a standardized aesthetic, a corporate literary style that makes a writer identifiable as, say, an Iowa writer.
…how, why, and to what end has the writing program reorganized U.S. literary production in the postwar period? And… how might this fact be brought to bear on a reading of postwar literature itself?
…It’s hard to say when exactly the presence of writers on campus came to seem natural—assuming that it ever has. Certainly as late as the mid-1960s, by which time creative writing programs were beginning to multiply exponentially, the sense of strangeness hovering about this juxtaposition of scholars and writers had not yet diminished.
…At its best, the genre of the campus novel capitalizes on the resemblances between a college campus and a small village, deploying its relative social coherence and richly articulated social-professional hierarchies in a revivification of the gossipy comedy of manners.
,,,the implicit subject (or project) of every campus novel is the existential triumph, by satirical objectification…of the writer over the institution that would institutionalize him.
…Paul Engle, who did not found the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but who did more than anyone else to make it what it became and no doubt remains to this day: the most
influential linking of an educational institution with literary production ever… Stranded in the fields like a rusty farm implement, his own poetic project was increasingly ignored, and the modern institution became his true medium. Artist turned administrator, he was also the administrator as artist, and in this role Engle became lastingly famous, a legend, much written about though all but entirely unread.…what is for students a transcendental ceremony of departure toward a “limitless” future—graduation—is for the more permanent inmates just another appointment on the calendar.
* Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written of a broader “anxiety of obsolescence” on the part of postwar novelists in relation to television. From this perspective the balloon would stand for everything with which literature was increasingly forced to compete for public attention in the increasingly loud and colorful 1960s. Because of the relatively recent insinuation of the broadcast media into the very air of daily life, mass culture had recently attained what seemed to many observers an aggressively ambient, enclosing presence…
* The substitution of attention-getting “telling” for impersonal “showing” is one way of describing fiction’s struggle for a place in the general economy of cultural attention, where competition for the leisure time of readers was beginning to heat up and the novel’s aura of deep cultural relevance and authority was, according to some observers, beginning to dim. Another was the retreat from the open market to the economic refuge
of the university.* “a spirited lament for the plight of those who once rocked Paris and who now, with spectacles on their noses, try to teach”
* But the force of the confluence of interests that come together in creative writing instruction—the student’s desire to be a writer, the writer’s desire for a steady paycheck, the institution’s desire to be responsive to the desires of its inmates—is so strong that it marches on and expands even despite an occasional bad-mouthing from its bystanders, victims, and beneficiaries.
* it is precisely an unresolved tension between the “confinement” of institutionality and the “freedom” of creativity that gives creative writing instruction its raison d’être as an institutionalization of anti-institutionality.
* Boyle was wont to fling herself into the political currents of her time, counting on them to produce the exciting sense of malleability in the world—the sense that “anything can happen”
* Increasingly she was convicted of adhering to the fallacy that interesting experiences in highly charged political situations could of themselves give birth to good writing. This tendency, combined with the constant imperative to make as much money as quickly as possible from her writing (Boyle continued to have children with various impecunious men), led to her gradual branding as a pretentious hack whose “heavy, yearning seriousness” of manner (Author of Herself, 189) could not make up for her general shoddiness.
* One most often feels guilt for deliberate or at least quasi-deliberate actions, such as lying and stealing, fucking and fucking over, not returning that call. Shame, by contrast, is an emotion associated with involuntary subjection to social forces, and marks the inherent priority and superiority of those forces to any given individual.
* the spell cast by Joyce Carol Oates would soon be broken—or, rather, the nature of that spell would change. Publishing too many books under her name, asking for more attention than the literary establishment can possibly give to any one writer, the symbolic value of shares of JCO in the market of literary prestige would start to drop.
* Literary maximalism can be thought of as a form of verbal pride, a way of being linguistically present, while minimalism is the aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction. But with a further turn of the dialectic we can see how minimalist shame is a form of attention-getting, and how maximalist pride is also a way of shielding oneself with words.
* Presented with such an outpouring of female creativity as one finds in Oates, it is predictable that her critics would begin to describe it as a horrible over-fecundity,
a pathological displacement of biological reproduction into roiling, breeding masses of literary characters, and would attempt to shame her literary labor back into obedient submission to the program of painstaking craft.
