“The Fall into Institutionality”: Literary Culture in the Program Era

We like to imagine the literary “field” as a pastoral space that precedes cultural institutions and commercial markets. Yet the sense that authentic authorship has come under pressure both from above (professionalizing elites) and below (meretricious consumers) has characterized middle-class perceptions since the eighteenth-century print-market revolution (“the inventions of paper and the press,” Geoffrey Crayon complained in 1819, “have made every one a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print” [Irving 118]). In the twentieth century, the felt dissociation of literary sensibilities has often been attributed to the academicization of literature and literary studies. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) describes how the image of the academic fiction workshop has been shaped by a deep distrust of institutions: accused of narcissistic experimentalism on the one hand and formulaic “assembly-line fiction” (Aldridge) on the other, the creative writing program has been said to combine the worst tendencies of the “incorporated” university: ivory-towerism and philistinism.

McGurl revises these claims by putting them in a wider socioinstitutional perspective. His project in fact pursues three related aims, each ambitious enough to merit a book of its own: it traces the institutional history and shifting literary tastes of the creative writing program, explores how structural changes in third-level education affected the landscape of postwar fiction, and attempts a sociologically musical account of contemporary literary culture that questions the “optical illusion of encroaching mediocrity” (410).

The Program Era assembles an impressive list of writers affiliated at one time or another with fiction workshops as students, teachers, or both: apart from the usual suspects (Raymond Carver, say, or John Barth and Flannery O’Connor), McGurl covers many lesser-known teaching careers (Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth) and explores some truly astonishing cases, such as Ken Kesey and N. Scott Momaday, who began their debut novels as MFA graduate students at Stanford. McGurl’s inquiry into how seminal writers have drifted in and out of academic careers suggests that we have so far underestimated the circulation of influence between the “culture of the school” (30) and the postwar literary scene. Indeed, his thesis is that the institutional shifts involved in the spread of the fiction workshop have reshaped the literary culture in the US deeply enough to make the postwar period a veritable “program era” (in contrast to Hugh Kenner’s earlier “Pound era”).

The new dispensation, according to McGurl, came in three phases. In the foundational period leading up to the 1960s, crafts-manship became a seminal workshop virtue. Whereas in the 1930s the unrestrained self-expressiveness of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929) could still be regarded as the mark of a self-authorizing literary genius, creative writing programs helped to institutionalize the values of continuous self-revision, stylistic restraint, and ironic detachment that contributed to Wolfe’s dramatic loss of prestige. McGurl recognizes this shift in the selfdisciplinary “aesthetic regime” (129) that Flannery O’Connor developed as an MFA graduate at Iowa. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Hemingway and Faulkner became icons of imaginative formal control, literary sophistication was associated with the mastery of the Henry Jamesian point of view. The originality of this phase of the program era, McGurl argues, is that elements of the modernist novel were adapted and “codified in the pedagogy of the New Criticism and then disseminated to a range of student populations previously underrepresented in the writing profession” (50). Mass third-level education ushered in a more systematic teaching of craft that echoed back and forth between the two separate corridors in the English department (MA versus MFA): the textbook manuals of the new critics spelled out modernist intuitions about “fine writing” that entered the fiction workshop as widely inculcated formulas (“find your own voice,” “write what you know,” “show don’t tell”) and returned to the new-critical anthologies as applied literary poetics. Due to the circularity of theory and practice, program...