(2009-07-27) Menand Mcgurl Teaching Creative Writing

Louis Menand reviews Mark Mc Gurl's Program Era book about whether Creative Writing can be taught. Mc Gurl's book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It's a history of twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so many writers now pass.... Mc Gurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. He thinks that we're all highly self-conscious ants, because that's what it means to be a Modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program. (Mc Gurl uses the term "reflexive modernity." There is a lot of critical techno-speak in "The Program Era," it's true. There are also flow charts and the like, diagrams suited to systems analysis. If you don't enjoy this sort of thing, you will not get very far into the book. It's worth learning to enjoy, though.)... Changes in creative-writing programs are influenced by changes in two related bodies of thought, both of which try to answer the question "How can we make people more productive and more creative?" These are the philosophy of education and management theory... And this helps Mc Gurl to make a larger point, which is that university creative-writing programs don't isolate writers from the world. On the contrary, university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit--the world of mass higher education and the White Collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them. Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with Real Life. (Note this is writing for the existing reading-class.)

There was a surge in creative-writing degree programs after the Second World War. As is the case with most new developments in higher education (College Education), changes in funding were responsible. Title II of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944--the GI Bill--provided forty-eight months of tuition for veterans who enrolled in colleges and universities. More than two million veterans, a much bigger number than anticipated, took up the offer, and by 1950 the government had spent more money on tuition and other college costs than on the Marshall Plan. The key requirement of Title II was that the tuition assistance be used only for study in degree or certificate programs, which is why creative-writing courses grew into degree-granting creative-writing programs. In the nineteen-sixties, the universe of higher education underwent a fantastic expansion. Between 1960 and 1969, enrollments doubled and more professors were hired than had been hired in the entire previous three hundred and twenty-five years. Most of the growth was in the public sector. At the height of the expansion, between 1965 and 1972, new Community College campuses were opening in the United States at the rate of one every week.

For, in spite of all the reasons that they shouldn't, Writing Workshop-s work... Did I engage in self-observation and other acts of modernist reflexivity? Not much. Was I concerned about belonging to an outside contained on the inside? I don't think it ever occurred to me. I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other's poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don't think the Work Shop-s taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make. (Maker)