Whether We Should Read The Writing Program As Exceptionally American

By Author: Porter Black
Total Articles: 54
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McGurl's concluding chapter turns to questions of nation, asking whether we should read the writing program as exceptionally American; notwithstanding its meteoric rise to prominence in the domestic context, writing programs are now a global industry. This chapter also explores the question of Jewelry On Sale enclosure through a series of fictions preoccupied by the possibility of getting outside institutionalism, and of self-transcendence into a place where you can be "who I am really not" and borrow from the experience of others. Through a reading of Bharati Mukherjee's career, McGurl highlights the unreflective nativism of minimalism by contrasting it with both maximalism and what he calls miniaturism, a mode of short, tightly crafted writing that abandons the minimalist truncation of range. Here, restriction in length and in technique is wedded to a radical ability to think beyond restriction, and this chapter nicely summarizes the supposed paradoxes of institutionally that McGurl has been exploring all along.

Critics who wish to build on McGurl's work might productively ...
... explore a number of questions. The first line of inquiry might be to extend McGurl's project by telling a parallel story about the publishing industry; McGurl's book is a stunning account of the production of writers and texts in the postwar period, but not much concerned with the question of how these texts became actual books. Although McGurl may be right to suggest that the campus novel is the form par excellence of the postwar American novel, these books all had to, at some point, graduate into the real world, and they did so because someone thought they were marketable commodities. This isn't to fault McGurl: he himself acknowledges that the story he tells might be fruitfully expanded by thinking about the publishing industry. Likewise, the rise and exponential growth of creative writing programs could profitably be placed in dialogue with Cartier Jewelry a parallel development: the "theorizing" of literary study. Of course literary study has always been theoretical; to claim we are or were against theory is simply, as Terry Eagleton reminds us, to be in the grip of another theory. But certainly, the story the profession tells itself once we were New Critical close readers, now we are not needs to be rethought by highlighting how, precisely, a huge number of students encounter, and learn to encounter anew, the literary within their creative writing classes.

McGurl's afterword takes up questions of scale, and this move suggests one final dimension: the implications of his book are far-reaching, but the book also reminds us of the value of the local. Just as The Program Era begins by highlighting the foundational presences of Iowa and Stanford, much work remains to be done on the stories of particular institutions, and on the stories produced at them. The book begins with "a plea": "We need to start documenting this phenomenon, moving out from the illustrious cases of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford University and a few others to grasp the reality of an enterprise that now numbers some 350 institutional participants and continues to grow. This enterprise is our literary history". One wonders how different the period will come to look as further links between individual texts and institutions are uncovered. That we can even ask such a question is a credit to the significance of this book, and it should remain a model of how to think about the field's extraordinary richness for years to come. Indeed, one of the cheerful effects of McGurl's study is to remind us, despite the endless deaths of the novel, of reading, of print, of education that now is a terrifically exciting time to be a reader of fiction and of criticism.