Mfa Programs

Reportage The "creative model": praise and accusations of fraud

Few publish, and pays the university

Humiliation and discipline. You could write a treatise on these two ingredients - at the base of the formation of an institution like the army - but we are not talking of soldiers. It speaks of writers and an anti-institutional as literature: American literature, in particular, that, in the opinion of an interesting and controversial scholar of the University of California at Los Angeles, is well marked from the impression of courses creative writing flowering in recent decades, to produce today's most novels of quality that readers willing to read them. Mark McGurl argues in The program was recently published by Harvard University Press, that "the establishment of programs in creative writing is the most important event in the history of postwar American literature." No one had ever written, no one, that is, had never dared to consider a half-century fiction and read it in the light of a paradox that those same courses post-graduate (MFA), whose teachers often distinguished by Toni Doctorow Morrison, are the first to admit that the literary talent you can not teach, have heavily influenced the culture of a nation. What you can teach, of course, is a certain technique, but almost no one believes that art can be taught in universities. Neither the teachers of the course as long Kay Boyle, who after sixteen years at San Francisco State University, wrote that "all programs in creative writing should be abolished by law."

Neither an English novelist and great teacher as Malcolm Bradbury (who died in 2000) who first compared the creative writing courses hamburger, "a hybrid vernacular that no sensible person would ever dream of eating, " but it was the first to inaugurate a Master of Creative Writing in England (at the University of East Anglia in 1970), where he taught, among others, to Ian McEwan. Before exporting much of the world, America has experienced the creative writing courses sporadically since the end of the 800. Then, in 1936, was born the Iowa Writing Workshop, the most prestigious master, where they studied and / or taught John Cheever, Marilynne Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, TC Boyle, Robert Lowell, Michael Cunningham, Nathan Englander and goes on and on. Only after the war, however, the MFA in Creative Writing began to spread. And if we want to play the game of McGurl, the list of writers who are related to American universities through writing workshops, is endless: John Hawks and Robert Coover at Brown; Wallace Stegner at Stanford, EL Doctorow at NYU, Philip Roth to 'Iowa, Bard and Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison in Princeton, NYU Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart at Hunter College and Columbia ... And again: Vonnegut taught John Irving, Michael Chabon, Alice Sebold and Richard Ford have studied with Doctorow, Foer with Oates, McInerney with Carver, and so on. Today in America the MFA in creative writing are 153 compared with 15 thirty years ago.