:Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLiterary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities. Lise Jaillant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. vi+270.Christopher KempfChristopher KempfUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs degree-granting programs in creative writing continue to proliferate—and, as they do, to exert ever more profound influence on literary and academic institutions—so too have literary scholars, exerting a kind of counterinfluence, continued to contextualize and at times critique such programs in relation to broader social and literary historical movements. Drawing on the scholarship of D. G. Myers (The Elephants Teach [1996]), Mark McGurl (The Program Era [2009]), and Eric Bennett (Workshops of Empire [2015]), Lise Jaillant’s Literary Rebels takes this divide between “creative” and “critical” literary studies as its structuring motif, revealing the extent to which, in both US and British universities, creative writers positioned themselves as “literary outsiders” (1), historically “uneasy” (6) within the confines of the ivory tower. In their promotion of individual creativity and imaginative freedom, moreover, creative writing programs on both sides of the Atlantic served an important ideological role throughout the Cold War; as McGurl, Bennett, and Frances Stonor Saunders (The Cultural Cold War [1999]) have likewise documented, the writer embodied in his—and it was usually “his”—creative autonomy ostensibly western values such as self-reliance, individualism, and artistic independence. Pairing now familiar American pioneers, like Paul Engle of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with British counterparts like Malcolm Bradbury of the University of East Anglia (UEA), Jaillant tracks the emergence of postwar creative writing programs out of what she calls the “informal mentorship model” (15) of earlier eras, following such programs through the “radical individualism” (110) of the 1960s and ’70s; in this later period, creative writing “abandoned the quasi-military discipline of the early days and left more space to self-expression,” to the point that writing workshops “became hotbeds for the cult of the self” (238). It is their institutional hospitality to self-expression, Jaillant contends, along with their “uncomfortable” (2) positioning between academia and the literary marketplace, that constitute the legacy of postwar writing programs in the present.A compelling post-45 cultural history, Literary Rebels relies less on theorization of the writing workshop—the kind of theorization that characterizes much of The Program Era, for instance—than on historical and biographical case studies of the discipline’s prime movers, an approach Jaillant terms “book history from below” (9). Literary Rebels arranges such studies across nine short chapters, each of which situates its central creative writer or institution in relation, first, to academia and the literary marketplace and, second, in relation to the issue of artistic—and ultimately political—liberty. In turn, these chapters are themselves grouped into two sections, the first focused on US creative writing initiatives, the second on similar British initiatives, an arrangement that allows Jaillant to delineate aspects of counterpoint and patterning across cultures, and that, equally as important, lays vital groundwork for future research on creative writing in the Anglophone world.It is appropriate, if hardly original to Literary Rebels, that the two creative writers who figure most prominently among Jaillant’s Americans are Engle and Wallace Stegner, the latter founder of the creative writing program at Stanford—to this day, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Fellowships are among the most prestigious institutions in American creative writing. For Jaillant, Engle and Stegner emblematize an effort on the part of postwar writers to marshal their outsider status toward institutional legitimacy. At Iowa, Engle “looked both inwards and outwards” (38), yoking Midwestern regionalism to the cosmopolitan values of literary modernism; it was this framework, Jaillant maintains, that allowed Engle to “bridge the gap between the old and new guard” (31), between Iowa’s philological scholars and more progressive educators, like Norman Foerster, who viewed creative writing as part of a broader cultural criticism. Stegner, too, worked in uneasy relation to his colleagues, in particular to the poet-scholar Yvor Winters, who controlled his own set of writing fellowships at Stanford and who insisted, well into the 1960s, that such fellows practice traditional scholarship alongside their creative work. Despite Winters’s opposition, Stegner’s effort to legitimate creative writing proved successful in both the immediate and long term; his insistence on discipline found welcome reception among ex-service members like Eugene Burdick, and the Stegner Program continues to exert a significant influence on US poetry and fiction. Stegner himself, though, would become disillusioned with what he saw as the aberrant values of Stanford students in the 1960s, removing his name, if temporarily, from the university’s promotional material and transferring his archives to the University of Utah. While Engle and Stegner have become fixtures in creative writing studies, Winters and Burdick certainly deserve more widespread attention—among its other merits, then, Literary Rebels constitutes an important step in recovering their legacy.Foremost among Jaillant’s British creative writers, in turn, is Malcolm Bradbury, founder of the creative writing program at UEA. Situating UEA within the academic experimentalism of the 1960s, Jaillant reads Bradbury himself as a kind of mediator between British cultural institutions and an increasingly international literary marketplace, what Pascale Casanova has identified as a “world literary space” (“Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 [January/February 2005]: 72). Literary Rebels focuses in particular on Bradbury’s leveraging of global cultural prizes as advertisement for the program at UEA. Through in-depth archival research, Jaillant reveals how the success of UEA students Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro was made possible, in part, by Bradbury’s not-always-aboveboard intervention, as when Bradbury selected the judges for the 1989 Booker Prize, awarded, to much criticism, to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. What such writers gained from their time at UEA, Jaillant argues, “was not primarily an education in creative writing or even mentorship by Malcolm Bradbury” but “access to a network of successful—or soon-to-be-successful—writers and tastemakers” (141). Eager to promote themselves as individual artists, however, UEA alumni often downplayed their connection with the university, framing themselves as “self-made” talents. Yet McEwan, for instance, was hardly “an isolated would-be writer,” Jaillant reminds us. “He was already there, at the centre of an institution that would continue to rise within the larger literary field” (141). As a case study, Bradbury’s work at UEA—alongside the work of his students—reveals the vertiginous interrelation of “outside” and “inside” in postwar creative writing, as Bradbury promoted British writers in a global literary context in order to advance his own cultural and institutional authority.While Literary Rebels focuses in large part on Engle, Stegner, and Bradbury, Jaillant devotes equal space to a series of para-academic initiatives in creative writing. The Rockefeller Foundation’s postwar support for American writers, for instance, awarded under the auspices of the Imaginative Writing and Literary Scholarship program, represents in Jaillant’s view an effort to “rescue the individual creative writer from the deadening influence of universities” (99), an effort particularly salient in the context of Cold War cultural hegemony. More predatory initiatives—including the Famous Writers School in the United States and the Faber Academy and Guardian Masterclass series in the United Kingdom—reveal the migration of creative writing from academic to corporate institutions, part of a broader movement of higher education into the for-profit sector. Jaillant’s examination of these and other initiatives, grounded in rich historical research, makes Literary Rebels more than merely an intervention in creative writing studies. To be sure, Jaillant productively globalizes that field, turning her gaze across the Atlantic to British creative writing initiatives and, as scholars like Casanova and Pierre Bourdieu do, to the international literary marketplace. But what Literary Rebels ultimately exposes—and this may be its most lasting legacy—is the increasing privatization of the humanities and of creative writing in particular, as neoliberal capitalism proves remarkably adept, continuously, at incorporating into itself even the most “outside” of literary rebellions. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724727 Views: 14Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 08, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.