After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University
280
After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University
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Overview
After the Program Era explores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl’s foundational intervention. Glass focuses only on American fiction and the traditional MFA program, and this collection aims to expand and examine its insights in terms of other genres and sites. Postwar poetry, in particular, has until now been neglected as a product of the Program Era, even though it is, arguably, a “purer” example, since poets now depend almost entirely on the patronage of the university. Similarly, this collection looks beyond the traditional MFA writing program to explore the pre-history of writing programs in American universities, as well as alternatives to the traditionally structured program that have emerged along the way.
Taken together, the essays in After the Program Era seek to answer and explore many of these questions and continue the conversations McGurl only began.
CONTRIBUTORS
Seth Abramson, Greg Barnhisel, Eric Bennett, Matthew Blackwell, Kelly Budruweit, Mike Chasar, Simon During, Donal Harris, Michael Hill, Benjamin Kirbach, Sean McCann, Mark McGurl, Marija Rieff, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Voyce, Stephanie Young
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384401 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2017 |
| Series: | New American Canon |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
After the Program Era
The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University
By Loren Glass
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-440-1
CHAPTER 1
The Creative Calling
MARIJA REIFF
Mark McGurl opens The Program Era by quoting Vladimir Nabokov's complaint to Edmund Wilson: "I am sick of teaching. I am sick of teaching. I am sick of teaching." Implicit in Nabokov's statement is that there is a better career that he should be pursuing. Though McGurl never uses the term, this drive to seek a meaningful and fulfilling career is often termed a "calling" in a religious sense. Indeed, the belief that there are certain careers that one must pursue in order to be intellectually and artistically fulfilled is deeply embedded in America's Puritan heritage. From before the founding of the United States, the Puritans laid the groundwork for a system of moral education that would teach students how to lead productive and fulfilling lives, and these Puritan values informed the rise of higher education in the nineteenth century. While creative writing programs did not proliferate in the United States until after World War II, the foundational ideals that created them go back much earlier. Though secularized, the modern creative writing program continues the Protestant tradition of discovering and fulfilling one's vocational calling.
Martin Luther was the first theologian to ascribe religious importance to work, and in a 1534 sermon he pronounced,
See to your vocation. I am called to be a preacher. Now when I preach I perform a holy work that is pleasing to God. If you are a father and mother, believe in Jesus Christ and so you will be a holy father and a holy mother. ... These things are none other than holy works to which you have been called.
For the earliest Protestants, no labor was beyond the scope of God's plan, and finding one's calling became a religious imperative. As the Reformation grew and spread, so too did the idea that work is an essential component of religious life.
The Calvinists further clarified this vocational imperative. They believed that God gave "a special command" to every person to fulfill certain duties because "Divine Providence has placed the believer in this position" and endowed Christians with certain gifts that they were obligated to use. For the first time in Western history, work became "an end in itself," and thus "the Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling" (79, 157, emphasis in original). This idea has come to be known as the "Protestant work ethic," a term championed by Max Weber in his study of Protestant beliefs and their role in the formation of modern capitalism. Because Protestants were "engaged in a task given by God," they were expected to work willingly and diligently, and their work was perceived as fulfilling a moral mandate rather than just an economic imperative.
When Nabokov quit teaching to focus on his writing full time, McGurl writes that he was "release[d] from the prison of the classroom into the richly reflexive freedom of artistic expression" (2). Though McGurl does not describe this as a "calling," it is obvious that writing was what Nabokov felt he was meant to do. Nabokov himself contrasted his loathing for teaching with his passion for writing, averring that "my pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting." For Nabokov, writing was one of the most rewarding activities he could pursue. Teaching distracted him from fulfilling his higher calling, and jettisoning it liberated him to pursue his passion.
This desire to fulfill the call is echoed in the language creative writers use to describe their compulsion to write. Thus, James Hynes describes writing as a "spiritual release," and T. Coraghessan Boyle describes an almost mystical power that makes him feel "strong, superior, invincible." Other writers agree. In We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Eric Olsen claims that, for him, "writing's not a choice"; Anthony Bukoski describes how he "yearned" to write; and Gary Iorio describes writing as a "wonderful passion" and an "awakening." Most explicitly, Jayne Anne Philips states, "Writing, or any art, is a calling, rather than a career." Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer more fully explain the writers' call:
It shouldn't be surprising that many successful writers seem to have some sort of compulsion that keeps them at it, or that compulsion seems to be a useful trait. ... This pleasure [writing] becomes for some people an almost mystical experience, leading to the persistent notion throughout Western history that writers have been touched by divinity or the Muse, or touched by something. (16–17)
This "compulsion" that has a touch of the "divinity" is clearly cognate with the concept of the calling. Despite the difficulty of their profession, writers are called to this challenging, rewarding, and mystical activity.
The assertion that writing is a calling is supported by the use of religiously symbolic language when discussing the talent that writers possess. Writers are endowed with gifts or blessings that the average person lacks; as Olsen and Schaeffer note, "We do like to think writers are somehow special, gifted — and lots of writers like to think of themselves that way" (17). Because of their talents, writers are hailed as visionaries, prophets, or sages, and their works are supposed to inspire, provoke, and enlighten their readers, the same tasks traditionally assigned to religious texts.
This concept of innate talent can be compared to the idea of "charisma," which Weber defines as "the certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities" (216, 241). Thus, to be blessed with charisma is to be gifted with divine or supernatural abilities, and the purpose of the calling, subsequently, is to discover and honor one's talent, a task infused with religious meaning.
This religiously inflected language has been used not only for the writers themselves but also for the MFA programs that nurture their talent. Thus, Paul Engle describes Midland, his 1961 anthology of Workshop writing, as the result of a "vision," a word with clear religious evocations; and Robert Frost, who was instrumental in creating the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, delivered a talk on its fortieth anniversary claiming that writing is one of "the great enterprise[s]" that can "carry the spirit deeper." Loren Glass extends this religious metaphor to the larger sociological framework of the Program Era, claiming that the Iowa Writers' Workshop in its formative years can be understood as a "charismatic community."
It is no coincidence that spiritual ideas and religiously symbolic language apply to both individual writers and the programs that nurture them. The impulse to find and answer the call was never conceived of as a solitary project. Rather, the Protestants established universities for such purposes, and these educational practices were carried over into the New World. In the nineteenth century, the institutionalization of Protestant-style higher education sowed the seeds for the modern Program Era.
Unlike their Catholic predecessors, Protestants believed that everyone, not just the clergy, needed to learn to read and write and be versed in scripture. This, of course, required an education, and according to Marilynne Robinson, prominent author and mainstay at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, these Protestant activists "established great universities and cultural institutions." In fact, John Calvin is sometimes called the "father of the modern university" because he designed his school in Geneva to be free, open to the public, and based on humanistic learning (Robinson 192). This Protestant propensity for education is one of the primary attributes that Weber believed contributed to the Protestant work ethic and the concomitant rise of capitalism.
Nowhere was this Protestant commitment to education demonstrated more clearly than in the United States. The Puritan founders established a college only six years after their arrival in the New World, and by 1900 more than 450 colleges and universities existed. According to Russell K. Nieli, "[V]irtually all" of these colleges were founded by groups or individuals affiliated with the Protestant church, and even universities that were run by the state "reflect[ed] a general liberal Protestant or Unitarian religious spirit rather than a purely secular or rationalistic outlook." For generations of Americans, education was founded on principles designed by Protestants, even when it was apparently secular.
This liberal Protestantism was evidenced both in the curriculum and the student body of the nineteenth-century university, which was distinguished by its appeal to average middle-class citizens. The Protestant revolution in education began with the mandate for every citizen to read, write, and study the Bible, and it reached its acme in the new republic. The students pouring into colleges in the 1800s were not only wealthy and urban; they frequently came from families of farmers and were "selected as much by individual traits of social ambition and intellectual curiosity as by privileged socioeconomic status." These students were not being trained just to be members of the clergy but also to be businessmen, lawyers, teachers, and government officials. Nor were these new students all white men. This was the age that saw a substantial rise in colleges for women and people of color. While access to higher-education was by no means universal, the nineteenth century witnessed a huge leap toward fulfilling Calvin's goal of higher education for all.
This nineteenth-century ideal of democratic education is at the philosophical core of the Program Era. Creative writing workshops democratize authorship by allowing average people to answer their creative calling. According to Workshop historian Stephen Wilbers, creative writing programs act as "an important form of patronage" that permits students, at least temporarily, to write free of financial constraints. This allowed prominent writers to arise from various economic stations, and many of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers — including Raymond Carver, Wallace Stegner, and Sandra Cisneros — were drawn from rural backgrounds or middle to lower socioeconomic classes.
The connection between the nineteenth-century religious university and the twentieth-century Program Era is also apparent in the way modern creative writing programs emphasize self-creation. Almost all of the American nineteenth-century colleges and universities taught what was called the "common curriculum." Unlike the research- and career-oriented schools of today, these institutions taught a comprehensive liberal arts program. The capstone of the college curriculum was usually a course in moral philosophy taught by the president of the college that aimed to connect the various areas of study into a coherent path for ethical living (Nieli 314). The goal of education was moral: to combine classical and contemporary learning to create well-rounded and productive individuals. This objective is explicitly stated in the famous Yale Report of 1828, which claims that education should "maintain such a proportion between the different branches of literature and science, as to form in the student a proper balance of character." Moral education aimed to create students who had proper training in all the spheres necessary for personal, spiritual, and vocational growth.
In this era, the arts became a key avenue through which students were taught character, which has ramifications for the modern Program Era. In the nineteenth century, the arts became necessary components of what McGurl terms "autopoiesis," the reflexive creation of the self. It was this goal that the common curriculum of the nineteenth-century university was designed to produce. In the autopoetic occupation of "forming morally earnest Christian gentlemen" (Nieli 314), the arts served an integral function.
There was also an increased stress placed on the individual in this type of moral education, which was designed to aid students in discovering their own personal calling. In other words, the moral education of the nineteenth century and the contemporary creative pedagogy of writing are both designed to aid the individual in becoming his or her own, unique self. Thus, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the arts, including creative writing, occupy much of the same moral space in the university as did the common curriculum of the prior era: they are designed to create self-actualized, well-rounded individuals.
With the rise of the secular and increasingly specialized modern university, creative writing filled the autopoetic void left by the demise of the common curriculum. As McGurl affirms, "The newly dubbed 'creative writing' was promoted as an antidote to rote learning and the conformist genres associated with it. ... [It] could be understood as a figure of democratized Authorship itself, of the spiritual authority of even the lowliest man or woman to play God in the domain of his or her imagination, if nowhere else" (41). With the waning of the common curriculum, the arts, and particularly creative writing, allowed students to pursue self-realization, and creative writing practices were implemented in the classroom to allow for "student enrichment through autonomous self-creation" (3). And this autopoetic process allowed students to discover their higher calling. In this crucial sense, creative writing is a moral act.
The idea that writing can serve a moral purpose — and indeed is a moral enterprise — is further evident in the mandate to foster empathy. Creative writing leads not only to the development of the individual authorial self but also to the acknowledgment and understanding of the individuality of others. Creative writers understand "that the truth of anything is relative to the position of the observer" (McGurl 399), and according to recent scientific studies, reading literary fiction helps foster empathy by showing how truth changes depending on perspective. Albert Wendland explains, "Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people's lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person's position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex ... [and] that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives." Creative writing becomes a moral act insofar as its product encourages compassion for others.
The connection between traditional Protestant values and contemporary creative writing is particularly pertinent for Marilynne Robinson. A professor at the University of Iowa since 1991, Robinson is a key player in the Program Era. But she is also unusual, achieving both popular success and critical acclaim while writing in an old-fashioned poetic style and exploring themes borrowed from nineteenth-century American Romanticism. Moreover, her work, both novels and nonfiction, is steeped in the tradition of theological inquiry. To quote Anne Thurston, Robinson's popularity is "somewhat surprising" because she is "quite countercultural" in her exploration of Protestant concepts such as mystery and grace.
Robinson is not included among the writers that McGurl examines, possibly because she does not have an MFA. In theory, her success as a writer is distinct from the successes enabled by the Program Era. However, Robinson's career is emblematic of the way liberal Protestant values still inflect and permeate the culture. She is "countercultural," but only in the way that she consistently reminds her American readers of their theological roots. More important, Robinson's career reflects how the ethos of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant education informs the creative writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After the Program Era by Loren Glass. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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