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

by Mark McGurl

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.”