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

by Mark McGurl

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.