This is interesting and provocative. Certainly the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where I took my Ph.D. in the late 1970s, was operated--by its highly acclaimed faculty, BTW, and not the University administration--as a factory for neoliberal or "conservative" consensus in every area, from the teaching of creative writing to the teaching of expository writing, and in the cultivation of the then-fashionable frenchified post-structuralist "theory" in literary studies, as opposed to anything with a "big thinking" perspective that could conceivably be linked to social action--except for the thought of the profoundly ambigous Michel Foucault.
The latter had to be approached with very long tongs. Everything had to be made small and personal, even when large moral and intellectual claims were made for the academic products being marketed. The expository writing program was systematically purged of anyone suspected of big ideas in favor of servile sycophants and snitches who mindlessly parroted the either reactionary or irrelevant neoliberal ideological doctrines of E.D. Hirsch, based on the notion that the "profession of English letters"--or the "professoriate" for short--could no longer pretend to make any "contribution to scholarship" but would instead have to move forward on the equivalent of a fee-for-service basis. The assumption there was that college English teachers had a uniquely marketable professional expertise, when properly indoctrinated in Hirschism, in the teaching of writing. There were of course also potential armies of expendable graduate students and adjunct faculty who would do the actual work. There were huge contradictions in the underlying theory, and there was AFAIK never any clearly demonstrable improvement in student writing as a result of the repressive purge, but the theory was a selling point for a profession both filled with rage by "the Sixties" and desperately alarmed by its possibly limited future. The angry and easily offended academic bonzes, fearing for the loss of their tenured idyll, were desperate to market the questionable new product, which promised a new stream of revenue and the opportunity to punish those who had dared to thumb their noses at the Wise. To bolster the broader reactionary thrust of its overall agenda, UVa began recruiting professed reactionaries to its body of graduate students in English. The departmental coffee room where graduate students often socialized during the day always sported at least one arrogant and abusive libertarian or proud right-winger who delighted in ad hoc ritualistic Marx refutation and broad denunciations of "liberals" of every stripe. It was expected of the "happy few" male graduate students who were hand-picked for success from the moment of matriculation, despite melodramatic departmental protestations to the contrary, that they go on record denouncing homosexuality, and it was also expected that they would delight their voyeuristic faculty supporters by stunts, such as seducing each other's wives and girlfriends, to demonstrate the robustness of their masculinity. (The anti-gay bias could be voided in the case of eg the family of prominent Virginia families, but was otherwise so absolute that even the most fervent and snitch-prone gay percussores among the avenging squadrons of Hirschism wound up without tenured positions at other institutions after they had served their purpose in the purges.) In 2001, the UVa English Department, which had risen to national prominence more than twenty years earlier and was then clearly in decline, achieved its apotheosis by graduating the Nazi Richard B. Spencer with a form of distinction invented especially for him, paving his way for acceptance into graduate school at the University of Chicago, where a prominent UVa doctoral alumnus had been a professor before returning to UVa to repaint the facades of the Potemkin Village expository writing program. The Virginia English Department also had a big sideline in creative writing. This focused on "writing small" in exactly the sense Bennett describes A gifted scholar and poet who had been part of Robert Lowell's circle at Harvard (and was at the time married to a well-regarded woman poet who characterized herself as a Marxist) was denied tenure and replaced by Gregory Orr, a prominent practitioner of what was then known by its non-admirers as "stones and bones" poetry. This was loosely related to the practice of Robert Bly and Mark Strand (or Georg Trakl by those fond of continental coffee). This school was given to documenting tiny snippets of experience in which the archetypal was revealed in somber little moments of intuition conveyed in Basic English. The occasional solemn touch of symbolism was an allowable variation on the original faint surrealism and the occasional humor of the original genre. Lines like, "The hand takes what the earth proffers" were ooh'd and aah'd over as if they were not cliches. No unseemly humor in that. This "thing" too was marketed as a student-friendly product. "I don't want to work for the meaning," said a prominent graduate student practitioner. It was claimed that undergraduates demanded with one voice that their instructors teach them how to write in the newly official style. Orr had the immense advantage, from the viewpoint of this de facto "school," of having shot and killed his brother in a childhood gun accident--the prose flag was carried forward by a young short-story writer from West Virginia who wrote somber archetypal tales focusing on fossil trilobites and the like. This unfortunate young man committed suicide with a shotgun, and the English Department promptly devoted a major part of its self-promotion campaign to the exaltation of his slender legacy. The promotional campaign in prose fiction was carried forward to a considerable extent by the novelist John Casey, whose teaching career at the University came to an end following a series of sexual harassment allegations in the early 2000s. Writing programs--and Iowa IMO is a far more virtuous example than the sinister and tendentious UVa experiment--do provide a forum in which The Young can develop their talents--but they also place a tremendous premium on smoothness, coolness, and a kind of decorum that can deal only with the blandest universals rendered within the smallest possible compass of experience. Nobody in such an environment wants to risk ridicule--although at UVa instructors like Diane Wakoski tacitly encouraged gay-bashing in her seminars. UVa was also a hotbed of venial corruption, sexual and otherwise. Graduate students who could afford to put exchange invitations to fashionable dinner parties for senior faculty had a tremendous professional advantage over those who could barely afford room rent. In this world, the sexual casting couch (so to speak) played a prominent role. I have no idea whether this applies at Iowa, but have never heard anything about it if so. I think in any case that the corruption, the repression, and the full-throated embrace in the writing programs of timid mediocrity wedded to cowardly vindictiveness went and no doubt still go hand in hand with the now-obvious sinister degenerative tendencies of the neoliberal late capitalist Republic. Whether "literature" itself has any future in the world, I can't say. Since the human race itself seems to have at best a limited future, perhaps not. Besides, the one indefinitely renewable resource of human beings is culture--we can always make more of it. So all of the concern-trolling over the fate of poetry and fiction writing may be a bit beside the point--eliminate capitalism, and the problem might solve itself--as long as there are still flourishing people. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#2066): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/2066 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/77194184/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
