Theory and the Creative Writing Classroom: Conceptual Revision in the School of Gordon Lish

In 1986, Marjorie Perloff remarked that American literary culture could be divided into two institutional “teams,” the creative writing program (or the “A Team”) and the graduate seminar in literary theory (the “B Team”). Each team, she continued, embodied incompatible values: A objected to B’s “philosophical jargon,” while B deemed A’s aesthetic ideology “soft and naïve” (45). Perloff’s distinction evokes a longer tradition of contrasts (both historical and rhetorical) between literary craft and scholarly intellection, creativity and critique. According to D. G. Myers, the initial impetus behind creative writing instruction lay in an “antischolarly animus . . . against philology” during the early history of English studies in America (16). For Myers, the postwar rise of literary theory merely recapitulated this conflict, resurrecting the “philological scorn for literary values” against which writing teachers had rallied since the 1860s (170). The condition of “theory” within American universities was and remains more complex than such claims suggest, but perceptions of its relation to creative writing continue to reflect their binary logic. Much as it appeared to Perloff in the 1980s, the institutional landscape of American letters is still routinely portrayed as split between practice and theory; “Planet MFA” and “Planet PhD” (Batuman).

Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) has complicated such dichotomies, revealing a history of circular (or “autopoietic”) relationships between academic critical programs (notably that of the New Critics) and the “program fiction” produced across the English department corridor. Since as early as the 1930s, argues McGurl, craft and criticism have co-evolved within a more encompassing system, the “culture of the school” (30). Exploring this culture, McGurl details deep-rooted connections between New Critical credos and the “implicit poetics” of workshop fiction (34). He devotes less attention, however, to writing instructors’ pedagogical uses of later critical and theoretical paradigms. From the 1970s onward, the program era has coincided both with the institutionalization of what came to be called “high theory” (a phenomenon whose rise and decline spanned at least thirty years) and with the related emergence of literary works which themselves reflect theory’s influence. Many of these “novels after theory” result not only from writers’ absorption of an ambient “intellectual climate” (Ryan 6), nor even, as in Nicholas Dames’s notion of a “theory generation,” from their liberal arts education. Rather, a significant range of recent American literature also registers theory’s impact upon the creative writing classroom.

This essay reconstructs a crucial context for theory’s diffusion into postwar American literary production: the creative writing classes run by the author, teacher, and editor Gordon Lish. Described as “one of the major formulators of the canon of contemporary American fiction” (Meanor 672), Lish is nonetheless, in Don DeLillo’s phrase, “famous for all the wrong reasons.”¹ Among these reasons is his reception almost exclusively as an advocate of literary minimalism, a label which, while not wholly inaccurate, occludes his full significance. Although Lish is most widely known for his editing of Raymond Carver, his work as a writing instructor has been at least as influential. Teaching at Yale University, New York University, and Columbia University from 1973 to 1986, and privately in New York and across the U.S. until 1998, Lish has nurtured a variety of contemporary American writers (including, for instance, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Diane Williams), many of whom are now writing teachers themselves. By comparison with his editing, Lish’s teaching more closely reflected his aesthetic principles; pedagogy, he once claimed, was his “purest” activity (Interview [Neubauer] 171).

As this essay will show, Lish’s teaching was inseparable from his intellectual formation, including his extensive reading of philosophers and literary critics. Notably, though, Lish was less an authentic philosopher than an eclectic bricoleur. Eschewing exclusive commitment to any single tradition, he combined the concepts and terminology of often dissimilar thinkers—from Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva to his close friends Harold Bloom and Denis Donoghue—while also maintaining an interest in earlier influences, including analytic philosophy and the New Criticism. Moreover, Lish’s engagement...