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Mark McGurl. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. xiv + 466 pp.
For two generations, American literature has borne the impress of creative writing workshops, where writers study at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and for two generations, authors have subsidized their vocation by teaching in them. In 1996, D. G. Myers traced the history of these developments with great insight and mastery in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, a book he has updated since. Yet despite Myers's invaluable account, and despite the size of the changes to the landscape, no scholar, until McGurl, seriously followed Myers's lead to do the work of telling us what it means-of getting polemical and critical. If English professors had something to say about MFA programs, they probably were muttering it under their breath after faculty meetings. So The Program Era feels like something of a therapeutic breakthrough.
There are surely sound reasons, beyond humanities-building territoriality, for such a text to appear only now. One is the difficulty of the topic, which returns us to old problems of positivism and literary history. How do you derive the properties of specific works from widespread, manifold, and diffuse cultural forces? Novels and stories are dense, personal, colorful, singular, and tightly bordered by first and last sentences. MFA programs, on the other hand, have porous boundaries and the same sprawling, facelessness as any other modern institution.
An obvious way in is the question of form. Do workshops promote one aesthetic over another? Do in-house styles prevail? But wishing to avoid the tired discussion of whether MFA programs pasteurize student writing, McGurl sneaks in the back way, psychoanalyzing the clichés themselves. "Show Don't Tell," according to him, sends students the message that they should acknowledge literary tradition and be disciplined. The phrase "Find Your...