Review by Choice Review
Building on Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (CH, Nov'09, 47-1299), Bennett (Providence College) sees the growth of creative writing programs in the post-WW II era as one aspect of the larger cultural project of Cold War containment. That is, the institutionalizing and deradicalizing of fiction mutes the rebellious leftism associated with writers (particularly in the 1930s) and directs fiction away from totalizing and programmatic ideas and toward individualism and particulars. Essential to Bennett's story are the role of granting agencies, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, and the work of Paul Engle at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Wallace Stegner, who founded and headed the creative writing program at Stanford, is discussed more in terms of his own fiction than as an administrator. The opportunistic Engle's championing of international writers at Iowa brought the twin benefits of exposing them to middle American values and encouraging a mode of writing compatible with the US's Cold War values, a style they would use in their own countries. Though uneven in construction and tone, which wavers between ironic and genuine conviction, Bennett's study is well argued and full of useful (if occasionally trivial) information. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Brian Diemert, Brescia University College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
LESS THAN A LIFETIME AGO, reputable American writers would occasionally start fistfights, sleep in ditches and even espouse Communist doctrines. Such were the prerogatives and exigencies of the artist's existence, until M.F.A. programs arrived to impose discipline and provide livelihoods. Whether the professionalization of creative writing has been good for American literature has set off a lot of elegantly worded soul-searching and well-mannered debate recently, much of it in response to Mark McGurl's seminal study, "The Program Era." What Eric Bennett's "Workshops of Empire" contributes is an understanding of how Cold War politics helped to create the aesthetic standards that continue to rule over writing workshops today. Sponsored by foundations dedicated to defeating Communism, creative-writing programs during the postwar period taught aspiring authors certain rules of propriety. Good literature, students learned, contains "sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies." The goal, according to Bennett, was to discourage the abstract theorizing and systematic social critiques to which the radical literature of the 1930s had been prone, in favor of a focus on the personal, the concrete and the individual. While workshop administrators like Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner wanted to spread American values, they did not want to be caught imposing a particular ideology on their students, for fear of appearing to use the same tactics as the communists. Thus they presented their aesthetic principles as a nonpolitical, universally valid means of cultivating writerly craft. The continued status of "show, don't tell" as a self-evident truth, dutifully dispensed to anyone who ventures into a creative-writing class, is one proof of their success. Bennett's argument is a persuasive reminder that certain seemingly timeless criteria of good writing are actually the product of historically bound political agendas, and it will be especially useful to anyone seeking to expand the repertoire of stylistic strategies taught within creative-writing programs. That said, some sections are better researched than others. His chapters on Stegner, Hemingway and Henry James lack the detailed institutional machinations that make his account of Engle's career so compelling. Moreover, he uses the early history to support his claim that creative-writing programs continue to bolster a procapitalist worldview today. But a chess move made to solve specific problems can serve unexpected purposes when the situation on the board has changed. Whether or not the aesthetic doctrines currently championed by writing workshops perform the same political function they once did, now that the very conflict responsible for their emergence has ended, is a question that requires further study. Finally, despite Bennett's misgivings about creative-writing workshops, his book is itself a convincing argument in their favor. A graduate of the Iowa M.F.A. program, Bennett has produced a literary history far more enjoyable than the typical academic monograph, for all the reasons one might guess. It features a winning protagonist, Engle, the ebullient poet-huckster and early director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who, according to Bennett, "moved too quickly through the airports and boardroom offices to bother with the baggage of complex beliefs." Here and elsewhere, Bennett never tells when he can show. The 1920s, under his scrutiny, consists not of trends, but of "racy advertisements, voting mothers, unruly daughters, smoking debutants, migrating Negroes, Marx, Marxists, Freud, Freudians and the unsettling monstrosity of canvasses and symphonies from Europe." Wallace Stegner, he observes, "wrote at length about not sleeping with people." Whether novelists and poets should make room in their work for the intellectual abstractions that prevail within academic scholarship, the academy would be better off if more of its members could attend to concrete particulars with the precision and wit that Bennett brings to his subject. Indeed, they might even benefit from taking a creative-writing class or two. TIMOTHY AUBRY, an associate professor of English at Baruch College, is the author of "Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 29, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Bennett (A Big Enough Lie) takes a look at American creative writing programs that avoids the tired "New York or MFA?" question. Instead, he considers how M.F.A. writing programs first emerged in the U.S., and how creative writing gained recognition as an academic discipline. Specifically, he examines two groundbreaking figures-poet, critic, and editor Paul Engle, founder of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and novelist and historian Wallace Stegner, founder of Stanford's M.F.A. program-who were influenced in equal measure by personal visions for American literature and by the larger forces of Cold War politics. Along the way, Bennett probes various contributing factors, including the rise of the New Humanism, fear of totalitarianism, academic ambivalence toward popular culture and advertising, and the merging of corporate and government interests in combating communism. The territory and the prose may prove a tad dry for casual readers, but for students of American history and literature, or academics interested in the history of creative writing, this text provides fertile ground for discussion and thought. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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