Saturday, May 14, 2011

[On Louis Menand]

I'll admit it, I'm still a bit sore with Louis Menand of The New Yorker for widely disseminating the canard in 2008 that there are "more than 800" MFA programs in the U.S. -- a never-retracted claim, such that the correct total (there are less than 200) has now been replaced, in many media outlets (for instance at least twice on National Public Radio), with the incorrect total.

It reminds me of a funny moment in an Urban Education class I took with the inimitable Robert Binswanger at Dartmouth in the late 1990s; Professor Binswanger had asked the class to tell him how many people were then alive on the face of the Earth, and when one student answered, "200 million," the good professor looked unnerved and said, "Okay, why don't I start writing these guesses down on the board." Clearly he'd expected to hear the right answer straight away -- surely, he thought, his students were bright enough to answer such a simple question? The second answer provided to him by a member of the class was "7 trillion," at which point he put down the chalk and pantomimed for us what our existence on Earth would look like if in fact there were 7 trillion people on the planet: His pantomime was of a man so crowded around with other people that he was effectively wearing a straitjacket. I'd say the same thing about the prospect of there being 800 MFA programs in the United States -- a figure we almost certainly will never reach, and which, even if the current growth in the number of programs were to hold (which it cannot possibly; these are the MFA's "boom" years) we wouldn't reach until well into the twenty-second century.

I just came across (via D.G. Myers' excellent blog, A Commonplace Blog), Menand's 2009?review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era for The New Yorker. Myers has already helpfully dispelled some of the additional myths about programs Menand disseminates -- one wonders whether The New Yorker actually has trouble tracking down the nation's handful of experts on creative writing programs to write or fact-check its MFA articles -- but I'd like to add some more scholarly criticism to the mix if I can. Here are a few things Menand says in his review, as contrasted with actually accurate statements on the same topics:

Menand: "Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.....There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem."

Facts: National polling suggests that the average age of a matriculating MFA student is twenty-seven. Anyone who's spent much time around creative writers will know that most of them began writing seriously in their mid- to late teens. It is not unreasonable to state, then, that the average poet or fiction-writer entering an MFA program has been writing poetry or fiction for approximately a decade, and with the recent explosion in the number of places to publish one's work -- there are well over a thousand literary markets in the U.S. alone -- it is becoming increasingly rare for programs to admit applicants with no prior publications, though undoubtedly it sometimes still happens (as does the admission of applicants who have already published a book or two in poetry or fiction, a phenomenon increasingly common, I'd note, in admissions in the latter genre). Menand's conception of MFA programs is based on a vision of the national network of MFA programs common among MFA detractors: That such programs only seek to admit, and ultimately only do admit, wide-eyed, straight-from-college, life-experience-free creative writing neophytes just waiting to be indoctrinated into whatsoever aesthetics and philosophies their professors feed them. The truth is, the average MFA matriculant has been out of college for half a decade, has worked a "real" job, has probably published work here and there, and isn't in any sense likely to swallow whole whatever his or her professors are shoveling. Many MFA students aren't even much younger than their professors.

Menand: "The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers."

Facts: I've had the privilege of attending workshops at two of the top creative writing programs in the world, and neither "ritual scarring" nor "therapy" in any sense apply to what I've seen and experienced. The term "ritual" suggests that the workshop is a pedagogical monolith, which it is not; every professor performs (if we must retain that odious term) the "ritual" differently, suggesting it really isn't much of a "ritual" at all -- but in fact a pedagogy, which differs from professor to professor just as a pedagogy for teaching history or math or physics or English literature might differ from professor to professor. I'm certain some workshop leaders -- Frank Conroy was one -- aim to "scar" workshop participants, but in fact the nominal founder of the creative writing workshop, Norman Foerster, instead chose to describe the archetypal workshop as "a sort of literary club presided over by a professor keenly interested in writers' problems." That doesn't sound either ritualistic or scarring to me, and if Menand is referring to "the fruit of theory" I don't know whose theory he could be referring to other than Foerster's -- the father of creative writing, by some accounts. The "therapy" claim is too insipid to spill many words on; no one would waste years of their lives, and in some instances tens of thousands of dollars, on mere "therapy" -- and an MFA admissions process which often begins with an acceptance rate somewhere north of the competitiveness of Harvard Medical School's is unlikely to end in "twelve-on-one group therapy."

Menand: "People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense--a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script."

Facts: Actually, the degree is an art degree -- and it makes one hell of a difference. In fact, the difference between an "academic degree" and an "art-school" (or "fine arts") degree is one of the central themes in the history of creative writing and in debates over creative writing in the academy. To get that fact so wrong is like writing a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and consistently misstating the former President's middle name as "David." As to the second half of the sentence, again, it very much depends on the instructor; I have absolutely attended workshops where "some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script." Tony Hoagland's workshop at the IWW in 2007, for one, which in many respects was truly excellent.

Menand: "...the premise on which the whole enterprise is based [is] that creative writing is something that can be taught."

Facts: Except that the first-ever MFA program, and for seventy-five years the top-regarded (and since 1996, top-ranked) MFA program, has consistently said precisely the opposite as part of its mission statement. Menand quickly concedes this point, yet offers the Workshop's philosophy as a response ("a conce[ssion of] the point") to critics -- when in fact critics of the MFA were simply ignoring the Workshop's longstanding claim of purpose, intent, and design by leveling their alleged "counter-claim" ("writing can't be taught!") in the first instance. This history is critical, and Menand fudges it. He then deepens the hole by quoting Allen Tate on the subject of MFA programs -- Tate never taught at a university with the institutional wherewithal to initiate an MFA program, so consequently never had any prolonged exposure to a graduate creative writing program -- and then quoting Kay Boyle, who in teaching at San Francisco State was teaching (if I'm not mistaken) in an academic M.A. program with a creative thesis option, not a terminal-degree, art-school MFA program. It would've been nice if Menand found someone who had ever spent time teaching in an actual MFA program to make snide remarks about MFA programs. I'm sure such folks exist, but you'd have to dig for them -- it's far easier to quote those with no knowledge of what they speak but a massive axe to grind.

Menand: "In 1967, shortly after arriving at Brown and just at the start of a boom in university-based creative-writing programs, [Verlin Cassill] founded the Associated Writing Programs, the professional association of academic creative writers."

Facts: No, no, no. No. The boom in university-based creative writing programs didn't start until two decades later at the earliest -- Menand spreading this historical inaccuracy is as troubling (dare I say exasperating) to MFA researchers as is his spreading of the "800-plus" MFA programs myth.

Menand: "Around the time that Cassill delivered his renunciation, there were seventy-nine degree programs in creative writing in the United States. Today, there are eight hundred and twenty-two. Thirty-seven of these award the Ph.D."

Facts: Ack! So desperately misleading. The entire article is about MFA programs (and full-residency MFA programs, at that) and suddenly Menand -- with no preamble or acknowledgment of it whatsoever -- offers readers data that lumps together undergraduate English majors with creative writing tracks, undergraduate creative writing majors, academic Master's degrees in English with a creative thesis, doctoral programs in English with a creative thesis, doctoral programs in Creative Writing, low-residency MFA programs, and (making up only a minute fraction of the whole) full-residency MFA programs, the type of program anyone reading the article would have though Menand was speaking of in citing the number "eight hundred and twenty-two" (in fact, at the time Menand wrote his article there were around 142 full-residency MFA programs -- or 680 less than he implied). Never mind that Menand overstates the number of doctoral programs with creative dissertations by about 20% -- there are only 31 such programs in the U.S., not 37 (and in fact the creative writing Ph.D. is the one type of graduate creative writing program there are many more of outside the U.S. than inside it).

Menand: "[T]the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing...the impress of an institutional experience."

Facts: Oddly, though, no one can actually define when or where or how we might locate that "institutional" imprint, except -- as Menand tries to do in his review of McGurl -- by throwing out some old platitudes about writing ("show, don't tell") which, precisely because they are so problematic (and outdated) never had the sort of ubiquitous purchase which would lend itself to the adjectival descriptive, "institutional." Case-in-point: "Vote early, vote often" was hardly an "institutional" political principle in the early 1900s, even though certain corrupt political bosses (particularly in New York City and Chicago) were proponents of the idea. Just because a few folks who work in an industry say something doesn't make it an institutional presumption, and I'm not sure what sort of journalism or scholarship would wish so devoutly to have it be otherwise as Menand's brand would seem to here.

I find much of Menand's review to actually be very fine -- very astute -- but these foundational presumptions, all historically and factually inaccurate, are troubling precisely because they have been repeated so many times by Menand in the pages of The New Yorker, and because it just isn't that difficult to track down an expert on creative writing MFA programs to get your facts straight. In the last few years I've been regularly contacted by literary artists and scholars alike to get information on MFA programs, but never once by Menand or by any fact-checker for The New Yorker --?and neither, I gather, has D.G. Myers, Tom Kealey, Erika Dreifus, Mark McGurl, or anyone else we might reasonably term an "expert" on the subject. Why is that?

Source: http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-louis-menand.html

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