Learning to Love Postwar Fiction

Among the most public activities of literary criticism since the late 1970s has been to eviscerate the accounts of the value of literature that have underwritten the employment of literature professors in the modern research university. While the "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s produced no shortage of sharply politicized responses to this state of affairs, it might now be best simply to point out the incommensurability of the literary value that motivates most distinguished literary criticism with the value that draws others—within and without the academy—to literature.¹ Literary studies tends to view as important and valuable those elements of a work that illuminate dimensions of social, historical, or—now more rarely—linguistic systems. By contrast, psychologists, philosophers, book club members, and journalists tend to view as important and valuable the special kind of experience literature gives readers.²

Over the past decade, literary critics have awoken in great numbers to the necessity of reconnecting with the sources of extradisciplinary support and prestige. A number of projects—most recently the cognitive studies attempt to renew the traditional claim that literature cultivates empathetic experience—are explicitly framed in terms of this necessity.³ These critics present themselves as revolutionary in regard to the recent past of the discipline and often forswear many of what have come to be criticism's basic methods and concepts. It is a striking sign of the potential problems of such projects that the cognitive studies approach, for example, consists almost entirely of the application to literature of the claims of other disciplines. Here literary studies reconnects to a widely acknowledged source of literary value at the risk of making the knowledge of literature professors seem secondhand.

Mark McGurl, in his important and ambitious book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, takes a different approach. For McGurl, the problem is not to align literary studies' index of value with that of what John Guillory has called the "lay readership," but the reverse.⁴ McGurl suggests that we should see the professional value that a literary object has for a historically trained literature professor—its position in relation to a social or historical system—as a form of aesthetic value. And then we should teach everyone else to appreciate this value. McGurl mounts this argument in the course of a groundbreaking history of the place where the chafing between the claims of literature as system and as experience has been the most intimate—the creative writing program.

McGurl confronts the problem of value immediately and explicitly, because the existing discussion of his subject has been structured by the debate about whether the creative writing program has been a good or a bad thing for American literature. This debate turns on what McGurl points to as the enterprise's central tension between "creative" and "program," a tension circumvented by the often-heard claim that "writing can't be taught." As McGurl shows, creative writing professors themselves are first among those who believe that writing can't be taught, preferring, in the wording of Iowa's mission statement, to see their role as the "development" of existing talent. Thus, McGurl argues, creative writing professors and their students avoid investigating a deeper entanglement of systematicity and creativity in their work.

At times in his introduction McGurl suggests that he will simply avoid as unscholarly and unobjective the question of whether writing programs should or should not exist, or whether writing can or cannot be taught, and will focus instead on analyzing the indisputable fact of the programs' existence, and the enormous, obvious, and (until now) almost completely unstudied impact of this institutional formation on American postwar literature. But creative writers might well see his interest in interpreting writing-program product from the perspective of its place in the institution as itself a devaluation of their work. Such a perspective, they might think, can't help but destroy the writing's claims to...