"The Fall into Institutionality": Literary Culture in the Program Era

Abstract

We like to imagine the literary “field” as a pastoral space that precedes cultural institutions and commercial markets. Yet the sense that authentic authorship has come under pressure both from above (professionalizing elites) and below (meretricious consumers) has characterized middle-class perceptions since the eighteenth-century print-market revolution (“the inventions of paper and the press,” Geoffrey Crayon complained in 1819, “have made every one a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print” [Irving 118]). In the twentieth century, the felt dissociation of literary sensibilities has often been attributed to the academicization of literature and literary studies. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) describes how the image of the academic fiction workshop has been shaped by a deep distrust of institutions: accused of narcissistic experimentalism on the one hand and formulaic “assembly-line fiction” (Aldridge) on the other, the creative writing program has been said to combine the worst tendencies of the “incorporated” university: ivory-towerism and philistinism. McGurl revises these claims by putting them in a wider socioinstitutional perspective. His project in fact pursues three related aims, each ambitious enough to merit a book of its own: it traces the institutional history and shifting literary tastes of the creative writing program, explores how structural changes in third-level education affected the landscape of postwar fiction, and attempts a sociologically musical account of contemporary literary culture that questions the “optical illusion of encroaching mediocrity” (410).