The Program Era Quotes

“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.”
― Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

“bypasses the accumulation of traditional cultural capital (that is, a relatively rarefied knowledge of great authors and their works) in favor of a more immediate identification with the charisma of authorship.”
― Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

“The creative writing program would replicate the spirit of communal endeavor and mutual influence found in the Paris and Greenwich Village café scenes of an earlier era, but Nabokov was not one for that sort of esprit de corps.”
― Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing