McGurl 2009

Mark McGurl. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard: UP, 2009.

• reflective institutionality
• ix This book argues that the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important even in postwar American literary history, and that paying attention to the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and the practices of higher education is the key to understanding the originality of postwar American literature.
  • NOT pessimistic or a decline narrative
• well said x ...although it may end up somewhere else, thinking can only really begin with a reduction of complexity, with the imposition of a certain frame of analysis.
• overriding problem...[of] adapt[ing] modernist principles of writing...to a literary field increasingly dominated by bureaucratic institutions of higher education.
• xi the image of "system" as a gray plane of deathly regularity is an outdated and impoverished one...the image of the institution as a prison, or of institutionalization as something that happens at [xii] a mental hospital, is obviously a satisfying and perhaps even necessary one, but it threatens to sell us on a very naive sense of how individuals actually come into being.
• 3 ...creative writing cannot help pointing toward the unglamorous institutional practicalities of literary life in the postwar US and beyond. This, as we shall see, is the realm not only of institutions but also of technologies, the hard and soft machines in and by which literature comes into being.
• 4 institutionalization of aesthetic imperatives (here of modernism in postwar pd)
• 7 deep history of Eros and symposia from Socrates to the campus novel
• "fondling" of details in nabakov’s lecture notes
• 12 Anthony Giddens, "reflexive modernity" in metafiction—> (presumably) reflexive institutionality by way of cultural productions as "experiential commodities" (15), creative writing inhabiting an "experience economy" vs information economy
  • ex of tourism
• 28ff defining Program Era
• 31 ...I want to take the two charges most frequently heard against program fiction in literary journalism— that it is self-involved, that it is unoriginal— as occasions to begin the non-partisan examination of the reflexivity and systematicity of postwar Am literary production which I will carry out[.]
• 33 falling into the post c19 trap of opposing realism and experimentalism though it may be borne out by how fiction in this period develops
• 46-7 autopoetics of campus novel, analogous argument could be made for Pendennis, Copperfield, or New Grub Street, though DC is esp interesting in its lack of reflexivity
• proliferation of campus novels "a thematic symptom of a larger shift in the institutional arrangements of postwar literary production as such"— must all postwar fiction aspire to a type of campus novel-ness?
• "radically conventional"— interesting
• note 77 on systems theory l/u
• Moretti, Serious Century l/u
• 69 the anti-institutionality of institutions, ex the university’s commitment from the 50s to "creativity"
• 71 his "scholarly disposition" to see in creative writing programs "a discipline concocted as a progressive antidote to conformism instead charged with being an agent of that conformism on the literary aesthetic plane.”
• 72ff systematic creativity
• 73 paraphrasing Harold H. Anderson: "to argue for the creativity of the cell is to align human creativity with the life force, with the restlessness of need and the will to thrive. It is to reclaim the artwork as an instance, however remarkable, of the general [74] creativity of humanity, which is creative not only because it must reproduce itself, but because it must try to adapt itself to an ever-changing environment. That this collective struggle is so often experienced as beautiful is obviously to our benefit as a species. I confess I find this idea appealing, and much more interesting than the therapy of enchantment, or the aura of rarity, or even the supposed benefits of sympathy-training, that have clung to and justified literature for so long."