[Cwgrad-announcements] Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed re: Creative Writing programs

[cwhitney]

Robin:  Did you see the Louis Menand review-essay of McGurl's book in  
the New Yorker?

> http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all


D. Charles Whitney, Professor & Chair
Department of Creative Writing, 4159 INTS
U. of CA, Riverside   Riverside CA 92521
951.827.6076     FAX 951.827.3619






On Jun 30, 2009, at 2:25 PM, <rrussin at ucr.edu> wrote:

> I won't copy the whole thing here, but a few paragraphs in case you  
> want to check it out:
>
> By JENNIFER HOWARD
>
> Complaints about writing programs are legion. Critics — there have  
> been many over the years — tend to reach for sausage-factory imagery  
> to sum up their objections. Stuff raw writing into one end, they  
> say, and out the other comes a string of literary product in  
> whatever shape happens to be in fashion. In the 1980s, for instance,  
> minimalism à la Raymond Carver was all the rage, and writers who  
> emerged from M.F.A. programs were often accused of being Carver  
> wannabes. Even those who look with toleration on writing programs  
> tend to believe that you can teach writers but you can't teach  
> people how to write, as the saying goes.
>
> Enter Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the  
> University of California at Los Angeles. McGurl comes to the defense  
> of writing programs from an unexpected angle: the literary critic's  
> corner. His new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise  
> of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press), makes a claim that  
> is likely to surprise people on both sides of the debate: "This book  
> argues that the rise of the creative-writing program stands as the  
> most important event in postwar American literary history," he  
> writes in the very first sentence.
>
> ...
>
> Colleagues with Ph.D.'s now come to her asking for advice on how to  
> make their nonfiction work more creative, while she and others on  
> the creative side have grown comfortable publishing more academic  
> papers, in part because they too must satisfy tenure requirements.  
> "Everybody's influencing everybody else," Pollack reports. In  
> graduate classes, "there's a lot of mingling going on" between  
> critics and creative writers.
>
> If McGurl is living proof that a literary critic — "a museless  
> pedant," as he jokingly says in The Program Era — can treat creative- 
> writing programs with respect, even admiration, is the world ready  
> to set aside the sausage-factory debate? The university may be the  
> best place to move that conversation forward. Writing and publishing  
> have grown decentralized as the power of New York wanes. Pollack  
> hopes that more people will give creative-writing programs credit  
> for "keeping the flame alive a little bit" and back off the attack.  
> "How can it hurt the world if there are as many people as possible  
> spending two years reading and writing?" she asks. "What is the harm  
> of that?"
>
> Robin Russin
> Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor
> Department of Theatre
> University of California, Riverside
> Riverside, CA 92521
> (951) 827-2707
> (213) 949-1061 cel
> robin.russin at ucr.edu
>
> "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." - William Munny in  
> "Unforgiven," written by David Webb Peoples
>
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