The Program Era, by Mark McGurl

There have now been a few, mostly positive, reviews of Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (in the New Yorker, Bookforum), but if you have read these, or read anything else about the book, I hope your interests have been piqued, because it is a very interesting book for audiences both academic and non-, and it bids fair to become a foundational text for the way we begin to order the sometimes happy chaos of American fiction written after 1945.

The Program Era is, for sure, an academic book, addressing topics and issues that are of great importance and great contention within the discipline of literary study, but so are many older books which have served a general audience very well, including the book McGurl takes for a sort of model, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (as you can see, also the source of McGurl’s title). The Program Era deserves as broad an audience as any of those older generation of books ever got, and will be, I think, as useful. McGurl has a remarkable gift (probably honed during his days writing for The New York Times) at moving between many small narratives while keeping the reader conscious of his overarching themes and argument. Such a skill is critical in a book like this, which is both a rich treasury of small histories of individual writers and programs and a sustained argument for the way these multitudes fit into a system which has changed the way literature is written (most obviously), how it's evaluated, and even how it’s read.

McGurl’s book is, first and foremost, a call to see and think critically about the glaringly obvious: although creative writing programs pre-dated WWII, their growth after 1945 is the bold-faced headline of the story of late 20th century literature. And scholars (and readers) of that era need to start thinking about it: as he says in an essay published in 2005 in the journal Critical Inquiry, “it is only a small exaggeration to say that the rise of the creative writing program has been ignored in historicist studies of the postwar period.” Instead of academic attention, he found that the conversation about creative writing programs tended to obsess over whether or not the programs were “good” for literature or detrimental. Suspending this merry-go-round of an argument, he goes on to say, “What is needed now… are studies that take the rise and spread of the creative writing program not as an occasion for praise or lamentation but as an established fact in need of historical interpretation: how, why, and to what end has the writing program reorganized American literary production in the postwar period? How might it be brought to bear on a reading of the literature itself?”

However, McGurl doesn’t back away from the question of the aesthetic consequences of the rise of the program; in fact, he uses the two main charges against creative writing, “that it is self-involved, that it is unoriginal,” as his main analytical categories—in what ways, he asks, are the works produced by writers associated with programs not so much self-involved as reflexive—interested in expressing ideas about the nature and grounds of their creation—and in what ways are they systematic—that is, how do they bear the traces of a common (but changing) set of ideas about what counts as good writing?

The strength of the book is the unifying vision of American literature this focus on creative writing programs affords—using these two traits, reflexivity and systematicity (which McGurl convincingly traces to the well-worn aphorisms “write what you know,” “show, don’t tell,” and “find your voice”) he is able to braid together the strands of American literature which readers often think of as completely distinct: metafiction, ethnic or racially-marked fiction, and minimalism–conveniently typified, perhaps, by John Barth, Toni Morrison, and Raymond Carver. By examining the ways that writers whom we might group in those three separate paths return to similar questions grounded in the creative writing environment—questions of reflexivity and systematicity, of “finding your voice” and “writing what you know”—McGurl demonstrates that these paths not only share common origins but common terms.

Particularly interesting is the way that McGurl traces a continuous line between the terms of maximalist, postmodern writers like Barth and Barthelme and “ethnic realist” writers like Cisneros and Morrison and Momaday in the way that identity figures into their narratives. Identity is, in addition to other things, a form of research, as is evident particularly in those cases of writers who do real archival research to re-tell or revive actual historical narratives, as Morrison did in Beloved. “Put baldly, what Roth knows about Jewishness, and Morrison knows about blackness, writers like Powers, DeLillo, and Pynchon know about the second law of thermodynamics, cybernetic causality, communications and media theory, and the like, and it is on that basis that they, too, are put on the syllabus.” This is a provocative statement, and will surely be hashed out in journals (and hopefully blogs) for years to come.

McGurl is a highly original reader of books both canonical and obscure—this book is worth digging through simply for the names of writers and McGurl’s excellent capsule glosses on their books, many of whom I confess I was not so familiar with. It’s a book that is very likely to matter, and a book that is very likely to lead to some very exciting and productive conversations about how American literature should be mapped and how it should be read—and written. 

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. The Big Read Howard Junker takes time out from editing one of the nation’s premiere lit journals to satirize the NEA’s oddly named Big Read. The program was...
2. Ceres by Mark-Anthony Turnage Friday Classical Music: Ceres by Mark-Anthony Turnage This is perhaps the only piece of music inspired by the horrific destruction of humanity by an enormous...
3. The Dearth of the Critic In the TLS, John Mullan argues that there’s people popularizing avant-garde music, but not literature While other academic disciplines have seen the rise of the...
4. Mark Haddon Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) has a new novel. If you’re interested, the Guardian has a lengthy excerpt. ...
5. Beckett Lectures on Literature The Guaridan: In 1961 an American academic, Tom Driver, quizzed Samuel Beckett about the confusion he found in his writing. Beckett replied: "The confusion is...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.