{"id":1352,"date":"2018-08-11T11:10:30","date_gmt":"2018-08-11T11:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:33:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:33:16","slug":"after-the-program-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/08\/11\/after-the-program-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Loren Glass, ed., After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Loren Glass, ed., After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University<\/h1>\n\n
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Erin A. Smith<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Loren Glass, ed. After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University.<\/a><\/em> Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. vii, 277p. ISBN 9781609384395. US$ 35.00 (paperback).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I remember being riveted by Mark McGurl\u2019s The Program Era:<\/em> Post-War Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing<\/em><\/a> (Harvard UP, 2009). It offered a grand unified field theory of post-1945 American fiction \u2013 a sophisticated, materialist account of how the conditions of literary production shaped American prose. McGurl argued that \u201cthe rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history\u201d (ix), making us rethink the relationship between higher education and the literary marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the Program Era, <\/em>as Glass describes it in the introduction, \u201cexplores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl\u2019s foundational intervention\u201d (1). After the Program Era <\/em>considers sites and genres outside McGurl\u2019s purview \u2013 poetry, electronic literature, creative writing in transnational contexts, creative writing programs at the margins. The collection consists of an introduction by Glass, 14 essays, and an afterword by McGurl. The 14 essays are divided into three parts: I. Antecedents (writers and institutions that pre-date the post-World-War II Program Era); II. Revisions (writers and institutions contemporaneous with the Program Era that complicate or challenge McGurl\u2019s thesis); and III. Prospects (the future of creative writing). The essays are universally strong, and Glass\u2019s introduction and McGurl\u2019s afterword provide the necessary historical and critical context for thinking about the essays together and for thinking together beyond them.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glass situates The Program Era<\/em> as part of the \u201csociological turn\u201d in literary studies, informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and also by new work on the institutions of modernism by Lawrence Rainey, Susan Stanford Friedman, and others. What post-War creative writing programs did \u2013 especially those based on the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop \u2013 was preserve and institutionalize the aesthetics of interwar modernism (3). The Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, directed by Paul Engle from 1941 to 1965, provided the model \u2013 peer review workshops, visiting scholars, fundraising \u2013 and also sent a slew of graduates into the world to begin and staff creative writing programs elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many thought-provoking, well-written pieces in this collection. Greg Barnhisel places creative writing programs as part of Cold-War cultural diplomacy, arguing that the modernism it institutionalized was de-politicized, reframed as a celebration of individual expression vs. Soviet collectivism. Sean McCann reads Russell Banks as an author whose career illuminates the outer limits of the Program Era. Donal Harris discusses the \u201cperipheral realism\u201d of Jonathan Franzen and Chad Harbach. Seth Abramson focuses on poetry and the MFA. Stephen Voyce reads the Black Mountain College program as offering an alternative, collectivist model of creativity. Matthew Blackwell sheds new light on the relationship between Raymond Carver and his activist editor Gordon Lish, whose admiration for gay writer James Purdy\u2019s \u201cpolitics of silence\u201d got transferred \u2013 minus the political charge \u2013 onto Carver\u2019s fiction. Other essays trace the careers of itinerant poet Vachel Lindsay and itinerant critic\/scholar Malcolm Cowley, J. M. Coetzee, and hypertext fiction pioneer Robert Coover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the listing above should make clear, this collection skews white and male and is not always especially self-aware about it (3\/17 contributors are women; subjects are overwhelmingly white and male). Eric Bennett\u2019s chapter on \u201cFlannery O\u2019Connor, the Cold War, and the Canon\u201d and Marija Reiff\u2019s discussion of Protestant ideas of \u201ccalling\u201d and Marilynne Robinson are notable exceptions. Ditto Michal Hill\u2019s \u201cTimely Exile: James Alan McPherson, the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, and Black Creativity\u201d which considers models of African-American authorship and social\/political leadership. This makes chapter 10, Juliana Spahr\u2019s and Stephanie Young\u2019s \u201cThe Program Era and the Mainly White Room\u201d especially important and refreshing. The authors talk about the race and gender politics of literary functions they attend, of MFA programs themselves, and about the \u201cclimate.\u201d If 2\/3 of the students in MFA programs are women, why do 70% of literary prizes go to men? Why are women and ethnic\/racial minorities over-represented in \u201cdebt generator\u201d programs (those that do not offer tuition waivers and require large student loans to finance) (154)? How are these creative writing programs different from programs in the 1960s and 1970s that were free and closely tied to racial and social justice movements?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, this is a smart, important collection. McGurl concludes his afterword with a worthy send-off: \u201cWhat seems to me perfectly clear, after reading this collection, is that an adequate historical understanding of postwar literature \u2026 can be had only by paying close attention to the production and circulation of literature and literary practices in the culture of the school. Whether the Program Era as such is over or not, that scholarly project continues\u201d (255).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erin A. Smith
University of Texas at Dallas<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the Program Era, as Glass describes it in the introduction, \u201cexplores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl\u2019s foundational intervention\u201d (1). After the Program Era considers sites and genres outside McGurl\u2019s purview \u2013 poetry, electronic literature, creative writing in transnational contexts, creative writing programs at the margins. The collection consists of an introduction by Glass, 14 essays, and an afterword by McGurl. The 14 essays are divided into three parts: I. Antecedents (writers and institutions that pre-date the post-World-War II Program Era); II. Revisions (writers and institutions contemporaneous with the Program Era that complicate or challenge McGurl\u2019s thesis); and III. Prospects (the future of creative writing). The essays are universally strong, and Glass\u2019s introduction and McGurl\u2019s afterword provide the necessary historical and critical context for thinking about the essays together and for thinking together beyond them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1937,1942],"class_list":["post-1352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-literature","tag-north-america"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5708,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions\/5708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}