November 30, 2011

On Mark McGurl's "The Program Era" (Part 2)


As I alluded to in my last post, one of the more discernable omissions from McGurl’s study is the proliferation of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing, though I want to make clear I hardly think it’s a shortcoming of the book given how these programs are a relatively recent phenomenon in the academy and their impact on American literature is still being debated. When Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont (of which I’m a graduate) began its intensive residency model in 1963, it effectively created the nation’s first low-res MFA program that more institutional departments are now starting to incorporate alongside their traditional programs of Creative Writing study. The beginning of the Goddard model, however, would seem to fit nicely into McGurl’s Program Era history, particularly how it follows the original concept forwarded by Middlebury College’s renowned Bread Loaf Conference in 1926 and offers a discernable alternative to the institutionally rigorous semester-long Iowa Workshop model: students meet and write at a bucolic countryside campus for about a week, workshop, then return home to pursue their own course of study, sending work by proxy to their selected advisor for feedback, and conduct their own workshops with novice writers for teaching credit. These are only the broad strokes, to be sure, but they do stand in stark contrast to the sort of departmental machinations at Iowa that McGurl outlines.

With the Goddard model in mind, it appears the spread of such low-res programs today is an offshoot of the anti-institutional impulse McGurl details in his look at Ken Kesey’s open disdain of Wallace Stegner’s method at Stanford and the Merry Pranksters taking the workshop experience to the open road with their school bus Further during the 1960’s. As the sort of open “experiment” Further represented (and sometimes courted disaster with, according to McGurl), the low-res MFA’s selling point as an anti-institutional institution with no real spatio-geographic bounds other than the campus epicenter where writers occasionally converge is seductive enough for the self-invested writer. If one is confident in their abilities as a creative writer—as I believed I was when I started my graduate studies—the value of such a program is derived from its lack of interference but without the instruction nurturing completely those egocentric Tom Wolfe impulses which mark the beginning of McGurl’s Program Era. That the student is held in check at a distance from his or her advisor (an established, published writer) while operating on a virtual campus of the self where the idea of the “department” has vanished is an idea rooted in the chapter “The Social Construction of Unreality” whose time may have finally arrived in Higher Ed for many reasons. But the illusion of total individualism for graduate credit, something which McGurl thinks Kesey was blind to in his antagonism with Stegner, remains from the counterculture ethos, having not been altogether banished from campus. Further may, in fact, be refueling for yet another roadtrip in Higher Ed.

November 16, 2011

On Mark McGurl's "The Program Era" (Part 1)


Writing a single blog post on Mark McGurl's award-winning The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard UP, 2009), I have to say after a fairly entranced reading of it, seems unfair given the scope of this study in not only mapping the trajectory of creative writing studies from its earliest beginnings in progressive education to its current-day entrenchment in the university and college cirriculum but tying this to the novel proposition that American fiction is supremely better for it today (despite popular grousing to the contrary). There is much here of clear importance for anyone studying creative writing -- and perhaps for those who are not creative writers themselves in academia -- but I'll try to work my way through, however haphazardly, at least a few posts about this study over the next few weeks.

From the first sentence of the preface, I must note what was my immediate admiration for McGurl in the ambition of his following statement:

"This book argues that the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history, and that paying attention to the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and the practices of higher education is the key to understanding the originality of postwar American fiction." (ix)

As a creative writer, even before I reach McGurl's opening case study on Vladimir Nabokov as the archetypal anti-program writer-who-hates-to-teach and what this means about his Lolita, the idea alone of the institution being of fundamental importance to everything I've read in contemporary American literature and written is wonderous and frightening at the same time. Of course, as far as the latter is concerned, I'm referring to that notion of factory-line creative writing the biggest detractors of the Iowa Workshop usually refer to (and McGurl, to be sure, will delve into) or, on a more modest level, the traditional friendly-workshop model that was the basis for most of my own undergraduate and graduate experiences like most creative writers; but, regarding the former, it's as if McGurl is about to confirm a quiet, nagging suspicion we've all had for some time: that creative writing in Higher Ed has been, still is, and will continue to be a strange, contradictory proving ground of artistic achievement thriving in the drudgery of American institutional academia.

That his study will also "illuminate and appreciate postwar American literature by placing it in this evolving market context, examing how the university stepped forward in the postwar period both to facilitate and to buffer the writer's relation to the culture industry and the market culture more broadly" suggests how, like it or not, writers today may owe much to Higher Ed for recognizing both its cultural potential and capital profitability, allowing us to write our novels and stories as either an "experiential commodity" or a gesture of "self-tourism" (15). Given the recent development and spread of low-residency MFA programs in this country and elsewhere (of which I was a part of, and may address later), McGurl has poised this well-timed study to fully explain and clarify what he will refer to as the "conventional unconventionality" of American fiction which shows no signs of slowing down in the realm of post-secondary education.

November 12, 2011

Beyond Cannery Row: On V.S. Naipul's "Steinbeck in Monterey"


Few writers of supreme talent in this country and others have ever enjoyed the privilege of being true living legends in both print and public, and even fewer of those have been accorded a lasting posthumous celebrity where entire communities are devoted to keeping the memory of the author and the work alive. Perhaps as an addition to Barthes’ notion of the death of the author, V.S. Naipul’s travelogue essay “Steinbeck in Monterey” (1970; collected in The Writer and the World, 2002) exemplifies this rare public worship in America, documenting the efforts of the residents of Monterey, California to revive the tourist trade there around their acclaimed native son, particularly the squalid, near-deserted Cannery Row of John Steinbeck’s 1945 titular novel. “A writer is in the end not his books,” Naipul establishes first and foremost, “but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.” Unfortunately for the residents of Monterey (and Steinbeck’s literary legacy?), the myth is hardly benign as he sees it. The economic concerns of their town almost pale in comparison to the cultural baggage of a communal memory which conflicts with the author’s former attitudes, specifically Steinbeck’s apathy and dismissal of the Row after leaving it for New York City to become a major figure in American letters. Even the unintended consequences of The Grapes of Wrath in longstanding public perception of Californians’ mistreatment of “Okies” like the Joads may create impediments to move communities forward, if we take Naipul’s concluding interactions with a local real estate developer at face value. This is the other side of creative writing seldom visited, and somewhat paradoxical: the idea that great literary works, great authors can in fact be harmful in their short-sightedness, at least if their readers don’t know the moment when to let go.

Despite Naipul’s inherent critique of American literary sentimentality retained by twentieth-century readers, tempered with his opinion that the author himself deserves “some responsibility” for the quagmire Monterey found itself in following Steinbeck’s death in 1968, I imagine most established writers do not pay attention to the temporal concerns of their work’s influence, even as they may or may not consider any ethical responsibilities to the text (accurate cultural representations, etc.), to say nothing of possibly revisiting the effects of their works in the world of living readers. Indeed, creative writers could read into Naipul’s notion that Steinbeck, were he alive, should be pressed into resolving the problem in Monterey in some way, as farfetched as that may seem. No writer sets about a work as potential popular lore—and nor should they, either, at the risk of self-aggrandizement (which there are always plenty of opportunities for later, of course). Yet “Steinbeck in Monterey” reminds us, in that characteristically bitter delivery of Naipul’s which critic Edward Said always found fault with, that addressing the potential negative public effect(s) of their work may soon become the new standard grievance for today’s authors to wrestle with.