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Friday, June 19, 2009
Anxieties of Affiliation: The Creative Writing Program and Transnationalism
There are many intriguing conversations that could be started with almost any few pages of Mark McGurl’s brilliant (and tremendously interesting) The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, but the one that I want to try to start is about the way he brings his massive project around to take a look at transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora studies. McGurl reminds the reader on many different occasions of the international scope and influence of U.S. creative writing programs, while also insisting on the exceptionalism of this cultural formation. While U.S. programs have long recruited talent from abroad (Iowa most aggressively) and are of late beginning to be imitated in parts of the globe (mostly Anglophone nations so far), McGurl draws up the Program Era as a phenomenon as exclusive to America as it is to the university, unthinkable outside of the nesting of those two institutions--the university in America, the American university.
In the chapter titled “Art and Alma Mater,” McGurl begins by noting what has been implicit for most of the book: the nature of the creative writing program can lead to an acute case of the anxiety of influence on the part of the writer/student, which McGurl rephrases as an “anxiety of affiliation” (taking the term from Gilbert/Gubar’s No Man’s Land). What is craved is artistic autonomy, disaffiliation ("filia" - daughter) from the Alma Mater. McGurl compares this craving to Pascale Casanova’s assertion (in The World Republic of Letters) that
the collective concern of literary artists across the centuries-long sweep of global modernity has been to “invent their literary freedom” by disengaging their work from the compromising contingencies of national politics and addressing themselves to the world. “Denying their difference” and “assimilating the values of one of the great literary centers,” modern writers have been rewarded for this sometimes painful process of national self-alienation with admittance to a notionally autonomous realm of notionally universal literary value. (McGurl 326)
McGurl criticizes Casanova for being a little credulous on the question of whether this “autonomous realm” (the “notionally"s are his) ever existed, or could have existed, but agrees with Casanova that it is undeniable now that whatever the case may have been in the age of Goethe’s dream of Weltliteratur, the World Republic of Letters has become something completely different from what was once meant by the term.
what has replaced Casanova’s unified world literary space is what we might call a global literary pluralism, a World Pluribus of Letters. Here a writer is valued by readers in the developed world not for her transcendence of cultural particularity, but rather as a compelling aesthetic vehicle for its [that cultural particularity’s] appreciation. These writers, and the cultures they are understood to represent, are thereby “given their due” of intercultural esteem in a way utterly undisruptive of the mechanisms of global capital, which are happy to organize world culture under the (as it turns out) profitable sign of “difference.” Just as the international division of labor distributes different economic activities to different parts of the globe, so does world literature look to various regions and localities as reassuring repositories of cultural diversity and authenticity. (McGurl 329-330)
Engage counterargument to Walter Benn Michaels in 3… 2…
No, just kidding.
McGurl sees this World Pluribus of Letters as interacting with the institutional support structure of creative writing programs in order to facilitate the idea of disaffiliation from the nation-state and a re-affiliation with a sub-nationalism ("African- or Asian- or Mexican- or… Native-America") that is symbolically connected to international struggles for freedom and autonomy (e.g. decolonization). He believes this process operates in the same way that the citizen of the old Republic of Letters disaffiliated from the nation-state to re-affiliate with the autonomous realm of art. And he suggests that this new impulse toward disaffiliation/re-affiliation is also a little chimerical: “Of course, to describe these subnational-to-international links as ‘symbolic’ is to admit that in many if not most case they have been as fictional, in their own way, as the fictions of innocent autonomous literary value that Casanova so ably strips away (331).” McGurl mentions in particular the Chicano Movement “which was closer in a literal geographic and demographic sense to the ‘other’ nations, Mexico on the one hand, the quasi-mythical Aztlan on the other, to which it was transnationally linked but from which it was still, as a practical political matter, fairly far removed.” He continues:
What this meant, and what it still means, is that the literary technology of disaffiliation from the U.S. cultural mainstream can only really function if it has supplementary social institutional supports. Little magazines, urban-based cultural organizations, and small publishing houses have of course been crucial to this task… [but] it was above all the U.S. university that would sustain the symbolic connection of minority writers to a global pluralist space. (331)
McGurl has also made strong claims earlier about the importance of the university’s patronage to experimental writers (whom he calls technomodernists) and to Carver-like minimalists (whom he calls lower-middle-class modernists)--that they are sustained if not entirely at least predominately by being used (taught/assigned/read) in universities, particularly in creative writing programs. Yet his claims about minority writers (or the writing he calls high cultural pluralism) are much stronger: the university assures them not just of a readership, but of existence in a more complete sense: the university is the only site (or at least the preeminent site) in which this disaffiliation/re-affiliation can occur. McGurl describes the particular context in which this process now takes place:
In recent years, as the appeal of metaphysical belonging in the United States of America has dramatically diminished among the educated elite of the world, this conceptual pivot between internal and external difference from the nation has become an active site of cultural- and identity-political theorization. Hence the irresistible rise of critical discourses of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and diaspora in the U.S. academy, all of them geared, like the cultural nationalisms of the past, for spiritual and intellectual disaffiliation from what was once naively and unironically called “America.” At the same time, of course, these discourses have become a new way of accumulating symbolic capital in the fervently globalizing U.S. academy, pointing scholars toward valuable bodies of expertise they might claim as their own and offering a rationale for the inclusion of certain creative writers in an emergent canon of world literature. In this context, the question posed to itself by fiction in the Program Era is whether and to what degree one can disaffiliate from the nation-state while still being affiliated with educational institutions located there. (333-334)
There are a number of lines that strike me as somewhat odd in these big chunks of text, but I hope I have given enough of a sense (and an accurate enough sense) of the overall argument to be able to talk about them coherently. First, there’s the line, “Just as the international division of labor distributes different economic activities to different parts of the globe, so does world literature look to various regions and localities as reassuring repositories of cultural diversity and authenticity.” What does this mean--that outsourcing and feeling good about reading a book by a Zimbabwean are functionally the same? If he’s going to make this argument that “cultural difference” is completely amenable to global capital, then he should probably be arguing instead that “cultural diversity and authenticity” isn’t really a property of labor in the first place, it’s a property of the product, of the commodity. But this sentence doesn’t make sense to me--outsourcing isn’t about “diversity and authenticity” and “world literature” isn’t about a division of labor. And this is what I don’t get about McGurl’s certainty that the Pluribus of Letters prizes subnational affiliation over artistic/universal affiliation--it doesn’t really work as a system of “giving [culturally particularized writers] their due” because it is endlessly redundant, and it is the redundancy that actually drives publishing--follow-up hits that aren’t about “giving writers their due” but rather about piggybacking off the success of another writer. Take for example, the Bolaño phenomenon. Maybe we can say that Bolaño’s popularity has been a question of giving Latin America its due: it’s time we had another big author from south of the border—the Boom’s viejo, we’re ready again to remember that there’s a second hemisphere. But does this explain the increased coverage of many Latin American writers in the past two years—would Guillermo Martínez have been published in the New Yorker the other week if not for Bolaño? And can we really say that he was published there because the NYer thought it was Argentina’s due? What we’re seeing is just a general practice of short-term capitalization, not some ordered global system of “intercultural esteem.”
Secondly, McGurl’s use of “symbolic” in “to describe these subnational-to-international links as ‘symbolic’ is to admit that in many if not most case they have been as fictional as…” is really odd, as if symbolism does no work other than fancy; being ‘merely’ symbolic can still be much more than being ‘merely’ fictional, and is, at any rate, not synonymous with it.
But I’d like to return to the question that McGurl ends with, because I think it’s a really crucial question and one that turns his project (along with many others) inside out. As I said, McGurl is fairly resolute throughout the book at insisting on the national exceptionalism of the Program Era: it’s an American thing. And yet he also demonstrates in many cases that creative writing programs, especially the elite ones, have pulled in foreign cultural capital quite effectively; Paul Engle, the driving force behind the Iowa Program for many years, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But if we can’t fully see this foreign cultural capital as being affiliated to the U.S. by being mediated through or by writing programs, I think we can at least see it being brought into a more narrowly ‘American’ circuit--the circulation among programs or among universities. And this is true as well for the quasi-foreign (to the institution) capital of minority writers, who are also brought into new affiliation with the intensely ‘American’ ambit of creative writing programs; while the university secures for minority writers access to a “global pluralist space,” it also supports continued access to a domestic pluralist space in the form of the classroom. This is not terribly different from what it does for experimental fiction like Barth or Barthelme, but it is a significant function.
The programs, then, are the opposite of transnationalism studies--not because they aren’t themselves often transnational in scope or influence, but because while (according to McGurl) transnationalism takes disaffiliation from the nation as the enabling structure for the amassing of domestic cultural capital, the creative writing program takes the amassing of foreign (or quasi-foreign) cultural capital as the enabling structure for an affiliation to the U.S. (or rather, to a sub-circuit thereof).
That is, I think, either an answer to or a restatement of McGurl’s question, “whether and to what degree one can disaffiliate from the nation-state while still being affiliated with educational institutions located there,” but it takes the question someplace within McGurl’s project that I hope is productive.
Comments
Having not read the book—so with the caveat that I may be being unfair—the phrase “the fervently globalizing U.S. academy” struck me as a strange one. Really? Which is not to say that the academy isn’t much more “global” than it was forty years ago in some important senses, but it simply is much more complicated than that, especially since I’m not sure how to locate the structural difference between Critical and Creative writing programs within this single “the academy” which is so fervently globalizing. For one thing, if they’re “globalizing,” a word I instinctively distrust, I would expect them to be doing so in very different ways, like the different beasts the are. And if you want to discuss literature in economic terms (as he clearly does), then you have to take cognizance of the difference between programs geared towards the production of new literature and the industry which parasitically feeds on those writers (as my side of the hall does)? I can’t tell if he elides the difference between “critical discourses” and the kind of work done in MFA programs as much as he seems to be doing here, but it would seem to be a pretty important part of any discussion of the issue, right?
I also wonder about the work done by referring to “what was once naively and unironically called “America.” Any time someone talks about a past era in which people were un-ironic and naive, I get a little uneasy; such things are both almost never true, but very easily asserted without a shred of argument.
"if you want to discuss literature in economic terms (as he clearly does), then you have to take cognizance of the difference between programs geared towards the production of new literature and the industry which parasitically feeds on those writers (as my side of the hall does)”
what about translation? it’s a parasitic production of new literature; the product is individual translations, on one level, but also “world literature” on another. does McGurl talk about the role of translation in the CW program?
(I agree that “the fervently globalizing US academy”, at least in the limited context of the passage quoted, is far too vague--unless it simply means to imply that “global”, like, say, “diversity” and “excellence”, has become a buzzword, a vaguely defined but unquestionable good, for said academy....)
Internet’s unpopularity, enables the world culture namely to have unification one side, also has more argument’s one side
Yeah, I know, this is comment spam. But it’s for a Shanghai firm that manufactures actual physical valves. I just had to let it through.—BB
"it’s for a Shanghai firm that manufactures actual physical valves...”
Not only that, but it makes a relevant and valid point. I, for one, hail our new Spam overlords.
Aaron,
I think that Nick expresses one part of the idea well: McGurl addresses the “vaguely defined but unquestionably good” values of diversity and excellence as fairly top-down agendas that find one particular expression in creative writing programs (that is, creative writing programs emerged/grew/flourished as part of the agenda driven by diversity and excellence). However, I guess it needs to be added that McGurl isn’t of the party that thinks that these particular (vague/unquestionably good) values are deleterious--to writing or, I think, to the university. (He’s very clear that he thinks it’s good for writing, but not so direct about the university.)
I would say that he similarly sees “globality” as more or less top-down in that often projects with global consciousness are supported, and professors respond to the possibility of that support. Which isn’t to say that other reasons aren’t in play for why a professor might feel like diaspora studies is a fruitful and important line of inquiry (and I may be reading between the lines too much here), but I think that McGurl is analyzing the university for most of the book from a 30,000-feet-perspective, where a lot of the politics and values that he’s tracing or discussing are fairly high-level--not so much about inter- or intra-departmental rivalries as patterns spreading through the U.S. system of higher education as a whole. I think that this abstraction can, in many places (and here is one of the best examples), be considered a flaw with the book, but it is mitigated (I think) pretty well by the scope that is required for this kind of project, particularly as it is (quite self-consciously) breaking so much new ground.
Nick,
Translation’s not really considered in the book. I didn’t really know that translation was housed very frequently in CW departments.