Ron Strickland
The Politics of CreativeWriting in the Academy
The number of creative writing programs in colleges and universities has been
growing steadily over the past quarter century. In 1975 there were only 21 graduate
degree-conferring programs in creative writing; by 1996 the number had grown to 238.
(There were 27 undergraduate degree-conferring programs in 1975, compared to 310 in
1996). (Source: "A Brief History of the AWP," http://www.gmu.edu/departments/
awp/history.html [accessed June 8, 1999]. In this paper I want to look at what this
growth indicates about the political and economic configurations of English departments.
There is little question that creative writing programs have been a reactionary force
during the past fifteen years or so--that is, since the onset of the conservative backlash
against the "theory revolution." Some observers would suggest that there was a period
from 1970 to 1985 or so in which the net effect of creative writing programs was to
democratize English departments and to provide a space for opposition to the traditional
cultural hegemony in departments. I want to look at this history briefly, in order to
determine whether and how we might occupy the curricular and institutional space of
creative writing as a space for revolutionary opposition. The question is, is there any
redeeming radical potential in these programs, or are they merely safe havens for antiintellectualism and neo-romantic individualism?
First, there's the question of where to begin. Perhaps 1967, when the Association
of Writing Programs (AWP) was founded. There were a few writing programs--notably
the Iowa Writers' Workshop--going back to the forties and fifties, but, as the table in my
02/12/16--Strickland/2
handout shows, the numbers really began to grow in the seventies. I would connect this
growth to the growth and transformation of the American university system resulting
from Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" pledge to make a college education available for
every high school graduate who wanted one, and, of course, to Johnson's war for making
every draft-eligible high school graduate want one. Like many other curricular
innovations of that period--the growth of courses in contemporary, American and popular
literature, the establishments of Black studies programs, etc.--creative writing could be
seen as a democratizing force. Students didn't have to know the literary canon very well
to succeed in creative writing courses, and they usually didn't have to know the rules of
grammar or rhetorical conventions either. So, under-prepared working-class and
minority students who might be at a competitive disadvantage in traditional literature
courses could find a haven in creative writing courses. I think many of them did, though
I don't have statistical data for this perception. I would, however, point to the fact that
many of the first wave of African-American professors in predominantly white
universities--and practically all of the first generation of minority "star" academics--were
creative writers.
So, I'm ready to believe that, in institutional and demographic terms, creative
writing was at least potentially a progressive, revolutionary presence in English
departments. Curt White seems inclined to think that this revolutionary potential was
there in intellectual terms as well. I'm less inclined to believe that, but it's something we
can argue about in more detail later. What is pretty clear is that conservative literary
scholars saw creative writing programs as dangerously vulgar and democratic. Curt has
been fighting with conservatives in the AWP about this for years. And other observers,
02/12/16--Strickland/3
have addressed it as well. One good liberal critique is that of Eve Shelnutt in a 1992
essay entitled "Notes from a Cell: Creative Programs in Isolation" (Joseph Moxley, ed.,
Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, NCTE, 1992). Like Curt, Shelnutt
is concerned to argue that creative writers need to read theory. But by the early 1990's,
creative writing faculty had formed a coalition with traditional humanist literary scholars-those same scholars who had opposed the creative writers most strongly during the
1970's--in alliance against the theory revolution. This intellectual rapprochement against
theory put traditional literary scholars in an embarassingly compromised position from
which they never recovered. For years they had been dismissing creative writing as
lacking academic rigor and standards. Apparently, they were right about this. But
suddenly, faced with the revolutionary intellectual threat of postmodern theory--which
was much more intellectually rigorous than the vast bulk of traditional humanist literary
scholarship--the humanist literary establishment embraced the rabble and threw in with
their former enemies.
As Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh have demonstrated, the
intellectual/political basis for this unholy alliance is more political than intellectual. In an
essay entitled "The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop," Morton and Zavarzadeh
construct this alliance as a relatively direct expression of the interests of the dominant
capitalist order:
In its efforts to keep intact the legitimacy of bourgeois values embodied in such
undertakings as the "professionalization" of social practices, the ideological arm
of the dominant economic regime in the academy has engaged in a new mode of
institutional politics, the purpose of which is to build up a new coalition of all
02/12/16--Strickland/4
those academic "experts" and "professionals" who acquire their own cultural
hegemony from the ruling social order. It is part of this coalitionism that in
English departments all across the United States at the present moment a political
rapprochement is being negotiated between traditional humanist scholar-critics
and creative writers. It is historically significant that humanist scholars, who are
now seeking a political alliance with creative writers, are the very people who a
decade or so ago were opposed to establishing creative writing programs in their
departments. Creative writing programs, the traditionalists used to argue, were
intellectually "soft," and their existence in any department would inevitably lead
to a "lowering of academic standards," since they enabgled students to obtain
degrees in English without haveing been subjected to the rigors of historical
scholarship and other critical training. Under the pressure of radical critical
theory, that argument has now lost its ideological usefulness, and instead, in a
new political move, humanist scholars and critics are embracing creative writing
programs as bastions of the inviolable human imagination. . . . (159-60)
I'll summarize Morton and Zavarzadeh's specific theoretical critique:
First, they argue,
The dominant fiction workshop . . . adheres to a theory of reading/writing to be
not so much "produced" by cultural and historical factors as by the intervention of
the author as reflected in the "text itself." According to this humanist notion of
meaning, a text (like language) acquires its meaning because of the reality which
is located outside it and to which it faithfully "represents" and "refers." The
02/12/16--Strickland/5
author is the "authority" who situates the text aesthetically in relation to "reality,"
and his verbal skills and craftsmanship in making the text "correspond" with
reality are, in the last analysis, acts of a sovereign imagination--unaccountable
and unanalyzable moments of intuition, originality, and inventiveness.
(157)
These assumptions are opposed to postmodern critical theory, which
In all its various forms argues that acts of reading/writing the texts of culture,
which shape the "meaning" of (cultural) reality, are not a matter of the
reader/writer's "private taste," "intuition," sensitivity," "vision," or "originality."
They are, in other words, not "natural" acts, but complex social practices which
are acquired by the people of a culture in the process of being socialized through
education--in the inclusive sense of the word, in schools, churches, families,
sports, and so on.
(156)
Futher, they argue, the fiction workshop functions largely to preserve a neoromantic individualist subjects:
The fiction workshop is not a "neutral" place where insights are developed,
ideas/advise freely exchanged, and skills honed. It is a site of ideology: a place in
which a particular view of reading/writing texts is put forth and through this view
support is given to the dominant social order. By regarding writing as "craft" and
proposing realism as the mode of writing, the fiction workshop in collaboration
with humanist critics fulfills its ideological role in the dominant academy by
preserving the subject as "independent" and "free." (161)
02/12/16--Strickland/6
Finally, the workshop most forcefully squashes the very individuality that it ostensibly
nurtures:
The visible and external mark of the unique "voice" of the singular writer is his or
her "style." The cultural paradox of the fiction workshop--a manifestation of its
ideological contradictions--is that while the workshop focuses on style, which is
the materiality of writing, it in fact is bent on eliminating it. . . . The style of the
writer is to be so translucent as to be translucent as to be non-existent. Style, in
other words, establishes the uniqueness of the individual, but its transparency
immediately enables the individual to trasncend "writing" and "difference"
(materiality) and reach a transdiscursive space in which the writer can in his
absolute imaginative freedom communicate with equally unfettered readers.
Morton and Zavarzadeh wind this passage up by quoting Tess Gallagher: "I want my
fiction to be transparent. I want it to involve the character and experiences, but I don't
want the language to be visible (166)." And they end the essay with an analysis of the
ways that experimental and innovative fiction are excluded from the creative writing
workshop and the conservative effects of the workshop's predilection for "realism." They
propose that the only way to rescue the creative writing workshop would be to subject it
to an ongoing critique:
It is only through a sustained theoretical interrogation of its practices that the
workshop can be reconstituted as a site for the radical reading/writing of texts of
culture and through such transgressive activities intervene in the domiant relations
of production and in the existing exploitative social arrangements. The "voice" of
02/12/16--Strickland/7
the free-standing individual writer trained in the fiction workshop is the "voice" of
the entrepreneur, and as such it is a device employed to perpetuate political and
economic oppression in the guise of "freedom." Instead of "resisting" theory in
the name of the free subject, the fiction workshop should be the pedagogical
space in which the processes of signification in texts of culture are to be examined
and the construction of what is represented as "reality" is made intelligible.
(175)
This critique is largely compatible with Curt's critique of the current state of literary
publishing, though Morton and Zavarzadeh don't elaborate the connection between
mainstream publishers and the media and academic creative writing programs as Curt
does. I find the critique persuasive, and I expect that most of you will, though the brief
call for transformation at the end is comically utopic.
I want to turn, though, at the end of this paper, to the question of whether and how
it might be possible to rescue creative writing in the academy for some such sort of
revolutionary ends. I think Curt has been trying to do this in our program, for years, by
trying to recruit very smart students who will read theory, who will not hide from theory
behind the screen of neo-romantic individualism. I don't think this has worked, even in
our program, much less in the many departments where the creative writing faculty have
no interest in questioning neo-romantic individualism. One reason it won't work without
some kind of drastic change in the workshop format is that, even if a teacher wanted to
change this pattern, most students would resist. I see this in our program all the time.
We have innovative fiction writers like Curt White and David Foster Wallace, and we get
students showing up who want to learn to write like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. These
02/12/16--Strickland/8
students are a conservative bedrock. And departments are going to be depending more
and more on them. One of the ways that the academy will respond to the academic job
crisis is to expand the creative writing programs even further. Unlike literature and
rhetoric graduate students, who usually have some hope of finding an academic job after
completing their degrees, creative writing students often have no illusions about
academic employment. For many creative writing students, graduate school is like a twoyear discount vacation in Bohemia. They get to go hang out in the ambiance an academic
ghetto for a couple of years, meet some famous writers, etc. They may end up with a few
more thousand dollars in student loans in the end, but it's no more expensive than
bumming around Europe for a year. What could we do to radicalize these slackers? I
don't know. One thing I'd be willing to try would be to open up the workshop, to break
down the wall between creative writing and literary theory by maybe requiring all
literature students to take creative writing workshops, the way some programs (ours
included) require creative writing students to take literature and theory courses. Maybe
some sort of "theorized" workshop could be designed, something that would be teamtaught by a literature teacher and a creative writer. I'd be willing to try my hand at it.
02/12/16--Strickland/9
Works Cited:
Morton, Donald, and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh. The Cultural Politics of the Fiction
Workshop." Cultural Critique, Winter 1988, 155-173.
Parini, Jay. "The Limited Value of Master's Programs in Creative Writing." Chronicle of
Higher Education, November 23, 1994, A56.
Shelnutt, Eve. "Notes from a Cell: Creative Writing Programs in Isolation." In Joseph
Moxley, ed., Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana: NCTE, 1992,
3-24.
White, Curtis. Monstrous Possibilities: An Invitation to Literary Politics. Normal:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.