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.