The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

by Mark McGurl

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.

Exemplary in this regard was John Hawkes, a wildly experimental writer who taught at Brown University for many years. His student Rick Moody summarizes his notoriously amorous approach to teaching thusly: “He wanted us to believe in literature. He felt he had done his job if we could explain why The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was a masterpiece, from the standpoint of language and construction. Hawkes played favorites, which was bad; and he loved women a lot more than men, which was bad too; and he allowed us to drink wine in class, which in my case was an incredibly bad idea, since I was developing a drinking problem. All these things were inadvisable, but what was not was the idea of emotional commitment to the process, a strong relationship between student and professor.”

Like all progressive educational initiatives, however, creative writing does have a reputation for leniency, and why wouldn’t it? In creative writing more than any other subject, it can seem that the teacher is grading a person, not a paper, or answers on an exam. It is, after all, a therapeutic educational enterprise in a way that, say, a physics class could only inadvertently be. No wonder then if, as poet-teacher Anna Leahy has observed, self-esteem is a “hidden guiding principle in our pedagogy.”27 My sense is that this is true even on the graduate level, where plumbing one’s depths as a writer has been defined as a potential occupation. Of course one hears about cases like David Foster Wallace, who was said to have been harshly criticized by his teachers in the M.F.A. program at Arizona for his experimental impulses, but the most reliable source of negativity in the graduate workshop is no doubt other students—the competition—not the teacher. The teacher knows that for the vast majority of her charges the M.F.A. will not in fact function as a professional degree leading to a job but rather as a costly extension of their liberal education. In this sense it is a prolongation of the “college experience,” an all-too-brief period when the student is validated as a creative person and given temporary cover, by virtue of his student status, from the classic complaint of middle-class parents that their would-be artist children are being frivolous.

difference between evil émigré Humbert and his not-so-evil émigré author, or between Philip Roth and the “counterlife” lived by his novelist-character Nathan Zuckerman, or even between the author Richard Powers and the character called “Richard Powers” in the novel Galatea 2.2 (1995), is the all-important difference made by the creative counterfactual, by fiction as a cipher for freedom.

John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978)—the story of an only-somewhat-John-Irving-like novelist—puts it, “Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was ‘true’—how much of it was based on ‘personal experience.’ ... Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel.”31

Furthermore, the novel itself takes considerable interest in the way the raw material of Garp’s life experiences is used in the manufacture of his fiction, some of which (oddly enough) was published separately under the name John Irving.

handful of creative writing programs that existed in the 1940s had, by 1975, increased to 52 in number. By 1984 there were some 150 graduate degree programs (offering the M.A., M.F.A, or Ph.D.), and as of 2004 there were more than 350 creative writing programs in the United States, all of them staffed by practicing writers, most of whom, by now, are themselves holders of an advanced degree in creative writing.

Rather, as the un-credentialed, or rather press-credentialed, example of the high school graduate Hemingway makes clear, the key supplementary institution for the novel until mid-century was journalism, which remains importantly “on the map” of the field of literary production to this day. (Think here of the careers of Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Donald Barthelme, Tom Wolfe, William T. Vollman and the like, or of the obvious importance of the New Yorker and a few other reportage-dominated, large-circulation magazines to the fate of postwar American fiction.)

So, too, the realism of a Cheever or Carver, while it entailed a rejection of the extreme formal experimentalism of Barth and Barthelme and Coover, and of the influence of important academic promoters of experimental writing like Robert Scholes and Jerome Klinkowitz, is nonetheless rife with reflexive consideration of writing as an occupational and existential condition. The autopoetic processes they exhibit speak to the fundamental non-naïveté of modern literary authorship, which as a product most broadly of reflexive modernity and, more specifically, of the school, cannot help seeing and knowingly announcing itself as authorship of one or another kind.

Often labeled postmodernist, this literary enterprise would, I think, be more usefully described as “technomodernist.” This term reasserts the obvious continuity of much postwar American fiction with the modernist project of systematic experimentation with narrative form, even as it registers a growing acknowledgment of the scandalous continuity of the literary techne (craft) with technology in the grosser sense—including, most importantly, media technology. Seen in the sickly light cast by the latter, modernist narrative becomes visible not as the antithesis of debased genre fiction, but as a genre in its own right called “literary fiction”—which relativization does not, it should be noted, disable the distinction between high and low (one common account of what postmodernism entails) but rather situates it in a larger cultural industrial system. Indeed, the high/ low distinction floats everywhere in this system, internally differentiating “genre-fiction” genres and literary fiction alike along various scales, including those of greater or lesser consumability, originality, and self-conscious attention to craft.

Giles Goat-Boy is only one of the odder of innumerable examples of a conspicuously flourishing genre in the postwar period, the campus novel. Typically written as satire, this genre usually registers not the metaphysics but, more humbly, the ironies of institutionalization. Unlike works from earlier in the century, like Owen Johnson’s best-selling football romp, Stover at Yale (1911), or throwbacks to that earlier era like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), the postwar campus novel is most often written from the perspective of the faculty, taking as its focus one or another ludicrous dimension of departmental life, and almost always portraying literary scholars as the petty, cynical idiots we are. At its best, the genre of the campus novel capitalizes on the resemblances between a college campus and a small village, deploying its relative social coherence and richly articulated social-professional hierarchies in a revivification of the gossipy comedy of manners.

one finds defensive blurbs like the one on the dust jacket of Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982), which assures its readers that this “extraordinarily vivid book” is “anything but a campus novel,” as though these two things are fundamentally at odds.76 In this sense, since virtually every novel would be a “vivid” one, the implicit subject (or project) of every campus novel is the existential triumph, by satirical objectification—this may be true even of Giles Goat-Boy—of the writer over the institution that would institutionalize him.

What this means is that, in the modernist tradition, the portrait of the artist is not only an important single book and an important genre, but also a name for one of the routine operations of literary modernism. For the modernist artist, that is, the reflexive production of the “modernist artist”—i.e., job description itself—is a large part of the job. Flouting the strictures against personality proposed by T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” works like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, or—looking ahead to a profusion of postwar examples—Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior stage the autobiographical drama of heroic self-authorization that accounts for their own existence.

Consider the case of Philip Roth, who between 1959 and the present, even as he has frequently associated himself with colleges and universities (including, briefly, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) as an adjunct faculty member, has published some thirty novels and other books. In that period he has developed what it seems fair to call a singular authorial persona, where an unmistakably forceful and mostly invariant writing style—a “foaming confluence,” as he puts it in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), of “diatribe, alibi, anecdote, confession, expostulation, promotion, pedagogy, philosophy, assault, apologia, denunciation”—is matched with an obsessive attachment to a small constellation of patently autobiographical themes: masculinity, sexuality, family, Jewishness, and authorship itself.83 Even beyond the explicitly interrelated Zuckerman novels, the internal coherence and serial continuity of this autopoetic enterprise over so many years and so many novels are astonishing, and Ross Posnock is wholly justified in interpreting Roth’s oeuvre as “one vast text with each book to be read within and against the larger whole.”84 Roth can seem by turns endlessly inventive in finding new ways to manipulate its few terms, and to be without any imagination at all, a nasty narcissist lost in a highly polished hall of mirrors. The hall of mirrors effect is most forcefully introduced into the system by the Zuckerman novels, which provide a kind of running commentary on the life and career of a Je...

Henry James’s famous injunction to aspiring writers to be “one of those on whom nothing is lost!”—embodied in James’s own lifelong practice of note-taking—is shown here to be at one and the same time a handmaid to literary realism and to a vertiginously “postmodern” reflexivity: encouraged to “write what you know,” the novelist eventually is driven to represent his intimate knowledge of the writing process and its consequences, to address the fact of fiction making.

The constantly troubled interplay between “fiction” and “autobiography,” creativity and experience, in Roth’s corpus is what in systems theory is called the cut—the primary distinction—that initiates its very existence. At the same time, the making of this distinction implicitly posits a third position, a point of remove from which the initial distinction is made, from which its operations will be observed, and in which its terms do not necessarily apply. Observing this third space from yet another point of remove (call it the literary-historical perspective), Roth’s fictions can be seen for what they obviously, in one respect, are: real. They are real not because they are “true” but because they are the real products of a writer situated at specific positions in an evolving literary field.

Indeed, the unmistakable singularity of Roth’s voice and persona and the continuity of their presence on the scene of American literary fiction for the last forty years can make his career seem, paradoxically, among the most contextually determined the system has produced.

The intensely—but in my account predictably—ambiguous ontological status of this text as an “autobiographical fiction” is reinforced by the particular quality of its third person narration, a mode that might have heightened the distance between the narrator and the central focalizing character, Eugene. This distance is minimized, however, in Look Homeward , and insofar as it is maintained, it becomes the space not so much for an ironic accounting of mistakes made, signs missed, or lessons learned, but for narcissism: writing in the third person, that is, Wolfe can more effectively take “himself” as an object of narrative desire. “In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly”; “he was an irregular person”: note how the narrative cannot decide whether it is the place that is “strange” or Eugene that is “irregular”; whether his “flourishing” is amazing in the sense of having been improbable, or rather his flourishing is the sign of an amazingly good fit between young man and institution (which would suggest that he, too, is a “fine flower” of sorts). “Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such”: here the narrator apparently breaks with the perspective of Eugene, momentarily channeling the collective consciousness of the institution that affectionately patronizes Eugene’s arty unconventionality—a jagged shift in focalization that gives voice to the conventionality so tightly braided with that unconventionality.

his plans to become a playwright, Wolfe now began to write down, mostly as narrative, but sometimes simply in long lists, everyone and everything he had ever seen, felt, or believed, filling “enormous ledgers, filling book after book in [a] furious attempt to define the physical limits” of his “experience.”33 The enormous crates of manuscript he left behind as a result of this “torrent” of self-expression would provide the material not only for the two massive tomes published in his lifetime, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, but also for the very long, posthumously published third and fourth novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), which introduce a new novelist-protagonist, George Webber.34 Designed to prove to his critics that he could write about someone other than himself, these novels nonetheless essentially take up the story of Wolfe’s life where it left off as the story of Eugene Gant, telling it now as the story of George Webber. One can almost imagine Wolfe, spared the tuberculosis that killed him, living to complete the circle, as it were, of his autobiographical-fictional project, arriving at last at the Borgesian day when he must admit that what his novelist-protagonist has just done is write the sentence just written by Thomas Wolfe.

A crucial difference between the two writers, of course, is the historical contingency that put Wolfe’s NYU colleague in a radically less authoritative position with respect to the American reading public than Wolfe, who could entertain the possibility of “speaking for everyone,” absorbing the national body into his own Bardic self like a Whitman from hell.

unexpected.”16 O’Connor’s narratives do contain oddballs who do unexpected things for mysterious reasons, but the stories don’t often, for all that, take a metafictional turn, drawing attention to the mystery of narrative itself. Rarely in her fiction does one even encounter an enthusiastic storyteller—to represent the raconteur in action is perhaps inevitably to invite a heightened reflexivity into one’s text—although O’Connor claimed that a fervor for storytelling was one of the things that distinguished her region from others, especially the North. As she put it in a panel discussion held at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, “I have Boston cousins and when they come South they discuss problems, they don’t tell stories. We tell stories.”17 And yet she did not often write stories about storytelling.

If this metafiction attempts to exorcise the spirit of the literary amateur from O’Connor’s career, it also announces another project on O’Connor’s part: the disciplining of the egoistic authorial self with the whip of impersonal narrative form. In the ironically amateurish heavy-handedness of its satire, “The Crop” allows us to see this project at its point of first assemblage. Later versions would be more subtle, and would be put to other thematic ends, but the structure would be essentially the same: the author simultaneously commits a “sin” of individual pride (as autobiographical projection, as character) and punishes herself for it (as impersonal narrator). Enabled by the amalgam of intimacy-and-distance embedded in third person limited narration, this auto-punitive enterprise could be described as the narrative equivalent of self-flagellation.

But in R. V Cassill’s first entry into the textbook genre, Writing Fiction (1962)—his name would become familiar to later generations of students as the editor of the 1978 Norton Anthology of Short Fiction—this prominent Iowa (later Brown University) creative writing teacher prescribed the autopoetic compositional process thusly: “The writer of an original story begins to shape his material by accepting an emotional commitment to it—very much as if he himself were the first character to appear in the story to be.” This “scaffolding” is then “totally replaced by structural elements of the story itself before the story is done.”

In doing this, we can take seriously the concessions even O’Connor must make to the idea that something like “self-expression” is fundamental to literary production. Feeding literary production from the trough of “personal experience,” the idea of “self-expression” is not obliterated in the postwar formation but is rotated to the minor position in relation to the more widely touted cluster of values that includes impersonality, technique, and self-discipline. In other words, the dictum “write what you know” (from personal experience) is not negated by the dictum “show don’t tell,” but is folded into a larger entity that includes both positive and prohibitive imperatives (something like “show, don’t tell, what you know”). As a minor term in a dialectical binary, “self-expression” lies in wait, ready to reassert itself not as a contributory feature of the literary work but as the end-point of it all. It was already doing so in the Beat movement in the 1950s and would soon do so on an even larger scale in the progressive educational revival of the 1960s, which saw the emergence of the now ubiquitous pedagogical imperative to “find your voice.”

For systems theory, and for limitation theology too, knowledge as such only begins when an observer makes a distinction, imposing form on an otherwise amorphous environment, but also necessarily limiting the range of what the observer can see by its means. The obvious political conservatism attached to the Southern advocacy of self-limiting formality—a conservatism with which systems theory, with its skepticism about our ability to work “outside the system,” has often been charged as well—draws attention to a technical “conservatism” that is in fact essential to all definitions of the “institution,” even those that see it as a progressive technology. There may be politically conservative institutions, that is, or liberal ones, or even radical-revolutionary ones, but all of them are “conservative” in the sense that their function is to establish continuities of practice in advance of individual action. Although it would be hard to imagine any society without social institutions, the fact that they can’t help asserting the authority of norms is bound to lend the very term “institution” an ominous aura when seen from the romantic perspective of an idealized freedom or pure potentiality. This of course contributes to what, to this day, is a discomfort in some quarters with the very idea of the creative writing program, which stands accused of “limiting,” by institutionalizing, creativity

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is interesting for the way it can announce but not quite, not yet, actually embody a condition of pure expressivity. Instead it presents us with an unusual fusion or palimpsest of silence and speech: Bromden’s wordlessness amidst the events he describes in the present tense remains palpable even as it is being systematically negated in the (extradiegetic) telling. No wonder that the narrative, as it unfolds, is really nothing like the onrushing rant Bromden tells us to expect. Rather, it reads like what we would expect from someone Gordon Lish would defend as a “writer of impeccable discipline,” a writer schooled in modernist narrative techniques by the apostles of craft who taught at the Stanford University creative writing program.41

For Robert Rebein, Carver’s “true and lasting legacy” was in teaching writers of his generation “how to be a serious artist without taking art as his subject,” and there is something obviously persuasive in this claim.

mode.”49 Replicating his mentor’s general distaste for the “so-called experimental writing” associated with John Barth and the program at Johns Hopkins, or with Robert Coover and the program at Brown, Carver pursued a form of realism that understood itself to be elevated, literary, even self-reflexive to a degree, and yet responsive to what Gardner called the “normal” person’s taste for character and story above feats of metafictional linguistic trickery.

But in fact the psycho-dynamics of affiliation are even more complicated than this, because each of these institutions, the family and the school, are nested in and connected to others. As Henry James famously said in one of his Prefaces, “really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” and once we begin to inventory our affiliations it is difficult to know where or when we can legitimately cut the cord and pronounce ourselves autonomous. For instance, Hemingway may have been safe from the school, but as a figure who came of age in the 1920s, he like so many American writers of the time (and like Henry James before them) felt called upon to consider his affiliation with the nation of his birth. There were of course many motives for the act of expatriation—Paris was a happening place, and it was relatively cheap—but one of them was an urge toward disaffiliation from a homeland that seemed crassly commercial, provincial, and (especially with the advent of Prohibition) hypocritical. And indeed, if there is one form of affiliation in modern literary history that stands behind all the others—an occasion for intense pride or bitter shame, and until recently the unquestioned basis of the literature curriculum—it is surely the national one.

Witness the anxiety of Ronald Sukenick, one of the most daring and accomplished of the radically experimental postwar writers and, partly for that reason, a longtime creative writing teacher. In his memoir of his youth in 1950s literary New York, Down and In: Life in the Underground (1987), the university hangs like a specter over his sense of artistic and intellectual independence. Shocked to discover that his teachers at Brandeis (Irving Howe, J. V Cunningham) want him to get a Ph.D. in English (which he did) and “become a good academic” (which he delayed in doing), he describes his dilemma in the starkest terms: At stake here was that vague homunculus I chose to call my real self, independent of middle-class definitions of success and failure. This was the phenomenon vulgarized at the time as “identity crisis,” but was a real issue and it will remain a real issue. Is the American personality simply the sum of success-driven responses to the network of cultural pressures? Or is it the stubborn assertion of a virtuous independence, however unexamined? Horatio Alger or the Lone Ranger? Is there such a thing as a real self, and if there isn’t, what makes life worth living? Consumption of products? Liberty and justice for clones? Social welfare for pods?3 Note how the question of Sukenick’s affiliation with the university as an academic becomes, before long, a matter not only of masculine selfhood but also of national identity. If the ‘American personality” is unaffiliated t...

In this construction, the individual is both a member of one section in the multicultural “orchestra” of difference that is America, and also a kind of angelized observer (or auditor, to stick with Kallen’s metaphor) of the nation’s symphonic performance of a pluralized nationality.

Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” in Barthehne, Not-Knowing. The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme (New York: Random House, 1997), 11-26.

Shapiro, Edsel (New York: Bernard Geis, 1971),

Mark Seltzer, “The Crime System,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004), 557-583. Notice how, in Stephen King, an obvious desire to be thought “literary” coincides with the obsessive reflexivity of his best-selling horror oeuvre, where novelists are tortured in various ways by their popularity.