Introduction About Mcgurl's Book

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McGurl's first three chapters after the introduction each primarily explore an emblematic author or writing program (or in some cases, both at once) in order to establish and highlight one of his key terms for understanding the institutionalized creativity of the contemporary writing program and autopoetic process. Central to McGurl's argument is how two imperatives now so axiomatic that they remain largely unspoken, lest a teacher or student embarrass himself or herself with an "obsolete" vocabulary "Write what you know" and "Find your voice" meet in the creative writing workshop; here they are both mediated by craft, or the injunction to Merrell Boots professionalize oneself by showing rather than telling, whereby one mediates between experience, authenticity, memory, testimony, and observation on the one hand, and creativity, freedom, imagination, and fantasy on the other, with the care of technique, revision, or concentration ("Show don't tell"). The history of how these three writer expectations came to interact is also the history of how progressive education was ...
... institutionalized in the United States, and this history is in no small part the history of the postwar American novel.

The first chapter focuses on Thomas Wolfe, an author now so forgotten that, as McGurl notes, most readers are likely to confuse him with the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities. But, as McGurl also points out, Wolfe couldn't be a better starting point for a project such as this: his influence, his intimacy with the system of higher education, and the "monstrousness of his literary ego" set the stage for the importance of the writing program. For what the writing program could do is temper and rein in the enormous biographical energies of writers, and prevent them from Merrell Sandal falling into Wolfe's relentless mining of unmediated personal experience, and hence his eventual obscurity. In this chapter McGurl establishes the premises for his later discussion by understanding Wolfe's work as something like the extreme case of narrative as autobiography, and he immediately extends this story by describing how the practice of claiming one's own experience for and as the novel is complicated by questions of race in the work of Younghill Kang and Nella Larsen.

The possibilities afforded by craft are explored in McGurl's next chapter, which tells an intertwined story of the early years of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the career of one its most illustrious graduates, Flannery O'Connor. Beginning with a letter in which O'Connor badmouths a friend and former colleague for his love of Wolfe, McGurl reads O'Connor's career and the methods of the Iowa workshop as the "in red pen" corrections of an American literary history that would value Wolfe's attempt to resist any form of authority tending to diminish the "sovereignty of his genius". And if Wolfe is a case study of the way in which progressive education found in creative writing a discipline that could be put to the service of the cultivation of self-expression, McGurl's Iowa case study reveals how rhetoric of disciplinary rigor helped to institutionalize these programs within the university. Though genius cannot be created, it can be rigorously nurtured through negative feedback, thanks to which bad habits are reversed by craft; such tough love enables the discipline to sell itself to institutional higher-ups as a teachable subject. This model of writing instruction, embodied in a photograph of Iowa director Paul Engle at his typewriter with a whip ready to hand a whip, McGurl notes, that he might use on either a student or himself in a ritual display of disciplinary techniques finds a powerful example in O'Connor's fiction, which explains, and is reciprocally explained by, her time in and assimilation of the writing program. Internalizing what McGurl calls a "limitation theology", O'Connor's fiction understands the value of that limitation; her third-person limited narration maximizes "the ironic distance between her central focalizing characters and her disembodied narrators" so as to attest to "the cognitive limits of any embodied human life" and hence of the value of the repetitive rituals of craft as a form of tradition: "In O'Connor, the discipline of narrative form can be seen as a masochistic aesthetics of institutionalization".