http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3847 June/July/Aug 2009 Shop Talk Is the writing workshop a crucible for an aesthetic based on shame? Mark Greif
Some of the big questions about US fiction since World War II are obvious. Why did the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge become the highest credential for male writers (Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Wallace)—and why have its authors been mostly elite and white? Did fiction truly split up after the ’60s on lines of identity, as many think, so that female authors had to decide whether they were creating “women’s writing,” and the minimalists of the ’80s (Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips) became representatives of marginalized whiteness? And there’s perhaps the most complex question of all: What has the movement of postwar writing into the university done to our literature? Few professional writers in the second half of the twentieth century escaped attending college. Many wound up in MFA programs. Still more acquired university patronage as teachers or paid visitors. And the most esteemed, “high literary” books have sustained their sales and prestige in large part through assignments to undergraduates. The obvious nature of this last question only places the decades-long lack of a proper answer in higher relief. It is proportionately exhilarating to find, in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a brilliant and comprehensive mind developing one at last. McGurl trains his gaze on the university writing programs and some of the masterful novelists they have incubated. But he makes his most compelling arguments at the level of the writer’s practical place in the academy, examining the distorting (and enabling) effects of university discipline on individual artists, and considering the wider role of “creative writing” within a chain of notions of creativity (lasting from high school to the service-economy workplace) that inculcate skills for late-capitalist life. (CLIP) ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
