Writers and readers of the seemingly ubiquitous sub-genre
of literature often called Flash Fiction may be pleased to find McGurl’s study
features a brief yet admirable attempt to help explain the phenomenon of its
steady rise to acceptance these days as a valid literary form in
academe. The trotted-out consensus of Flash Fiction appealing to today’s abbreviated
attention spans I personally find tired and unsatisfactory for a host of
reasons—mostly because writers who read and write Flash (like myself) tend to
still read and write longer works of fiction, to say nothing of why poetry hasn’t
enjoyed a popular resurgence if this is indeed the case. Not surprisingly,
McGurl offers up the institutional perspective of Flash’s formal appearance in
American letters, which I find a much more original and plausible take on this indeterminate
narrative form's greater visibility.
McGurl traces the origins of American Flash Fiction in
the academy back to Raymond Carver and the beginning of what he refers to in The Program Era as the “lower-middle-class
modernism,” what is more derisively known as “K-mart Realism” but is usually
designated by critics as “Dirty Realism.” But McGurl’s terminology situating
this movement in distinct socio-economic terms is crucial for reflecting the
new stratification within Higher Education in post-war America. The enrollment spike
of soldiers returning home coupled with the founding of new colleges and
universities to meet the demand from the Baby Boomers diversifies the
collegiate ranks and lets the creative writing programs tap into a “dialectic
of shame and pride.” This dialectic paves the way for not only Carver to turn working-class
drudgery into creative writing success (thanks to attending classes at Chico
State by John Gardner) but allow writers like Sandra Cisneros to enter the Iowa
Workshop as marginalized ethnic voices and emerge with their own creative style
of what McGurl calls “institutionalized individuality.” The effect of
institutional programs on Carver and Cisneros, McGurl claims as primary
examples, are evident in the minimalist modes of the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and The House on Mango Street, respectively,
though it is the latter that he sees as coming into a distinct form, “miniaturism,”
that will eventually work its way into long “maximalist” forms such as her novel, Caramelo.
The Program Era
suggests, then, Flash is a transitional narrative (or a narrative transition?)—something
which I’ve often considered myself—whose purpose in the strictly academic vein of
creative writing is to either demarcate that which is not provided for the
reader or to lead toward the creation of other long(er) works normally embraced
by the academy and, perhaps, by writers and readers of a more affluent
socio-economic background. This may also account in some way for why modern and
contemporary segmented novellas, for instance, remain kept aside on the far periphery
of literature courses and creative workshop considerations or are deemed to be “experimental”
in value.
