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.