In "The Program Era, " Mark McGurl offers a fundamental
reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can
be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher
education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how
the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature
and even more important how the increasing intimacy of writing and
schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this
literature.
McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality
or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing
program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation
of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at
times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O Connor to
Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates,
and Toni Morrison.
Through transformative readings of these and many other writers,
"The Program Era" becomes a meditation on systematic creativity an
idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in
terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural
production both within and beyond the university.
An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we
thought we knew, "The Program Era" will be at the center of debates
about postwar literature and culture for years to come. "
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