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

by Mark McGurl

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