SocialKonstruct

Inspired but that doesn’t make its successor a novel of ideas. We aren’t getting Middlemarch here.

Such is the case historically: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/workshops-empire https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/04/how-creative-writing-programs-de-politicized-fiction

More of an aside this round, Tristam Shandy fashion.

Indeed, I just finished reading my first Sarah Maas novel a few weeks ago and it was so painful to see how poor the sentence construction and paragraph structure were that I facepalmed continuously for about the 4-5 hours it took to blaze through volume 1 of A Court of Thorns and Roses. Apparently apart from her poor grammatical construction (please read https://www.grammarbook.com/) her inability to make heads or tails of her novel's fabula and syuzhet caused me to wince in complete despair. Thank goodness reading Thomas Pynchon's latest fare saved the light of day for that month of reading.

Indeed, the Chinese publishing industry is pretty different than that of the US. Damn, even the French and UK publishing industries are too. The American publishing industry has pretty much been mostly about who you know and where you been rather than literary quality in so many cases. Also Mo Yan probably doesn't need a degree as he is state sanctioned by China until recently. https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-fall/selections/anna-sun-656342/ Plus if he were here in the US, I doubt that his brilliant prose would have seen the light of day. In fact, we aren't really even getting today's American writers who are critical of the regime in an explicit way. Perhaps American censorship is much worse than we thought and even more forbidding than that of the Chinese government (I feel that we have less freedoms here than overboard tbh). In France, I really love the fact that many of their brilliant writers didn't even get a MFA at all. Michel Houellebecq and Annie Ernaux didn't even have that fabled degree. Houellebecq went to the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon whereas Ernaux went to her education to become a schoolteacher and never finished her literary degree. Much of the blame can be placed on American literary agents in many cases. Granted, very rarely will you get a solid experimental novel from the slush pile but most American literary agents tend to look at the professional credentials of the person or get a referral rather than read the ACTUAL work itself. A prime example of such a royal screw up was the disasterous publication history for Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai which shows how bad the US publishing industry is. https://lithub.com/seven-ways-to-hand-sell-a-lost-modern-masterpiece/ and https://theadvocateblogdotnet.wordpress.com/2015/10/18/afterglow-the-last-book-textual-survival-and-apocalyptic-knowledge-in-helen-dewitts-the-last-samurai/. Thank God (or Allah) for New Directions Publishing for saving it from obliteration. I should have been a lot more specific and mentioned that genre fiction usually doesn't require the degree but literary fiction usually does and there is way more gatekeeping in that area, tragically enough.

Yes but for literary fiction, not genre fiction having a MFA/PhD is pretty useful. Genre fiction definitely a very different animal ya know?

I wouldn't use authors from the past decades as a benchmark for how things function today in the publishing world. In fact, I suspect most of the successful authors who land agents or get published by the big 5 are derived from MFA/PhD programs especially during the past 10 years when things got more conservative especially since 2016. We aren't going to get the great days when folks like Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis or Cormac McCarthy getting their debut novel through the gate in 2026. My God if you can tell me an agent or even a major publishing house in 2026 who would dare publish a literary equivalent of The Recognitions in this day, then I promise to pay you a million bucks if an experimental novel of that caliber sees the light of day in this age. Gone are the days when agents and publishing houses took risks unless you are Deep Vellum or Dalkey Archive Press and even those guys are hard to get published through. I am going to the submit to as many literary contests as I can approach while waiting to see if I got into a MFA/PhD program for this fall take. Now I feel is the time that I am ready to send out my publishable works to the public (I wouldn't have done it 10 years when I felt my writing wasn't as polished)...

Perhaps but I think that having a MFA or PhD will make it a lot easier to land a literary agent or develop the professionalized career. Writing is great but I doubt that many would be writing for just themselves without a public audience. So dismissing the MFA or a PhD route isn’t always inevitable.

Found this rather fascinating https://txtlab.org/2018/01/are-novels-getting-easier-to-read/. I think that European authors tend to have much lower scores than their American counterparts.

Because they have to tabulate who is going to be attending. Some waitlisted folks will be accepted when top choices decline. So major rejects will be notified when the class roster is determined with finality.

No word from UCI on my end this weekend.

University of Utah's tracks are only Prose or Poetry. I applied there for the PhD level and I would assume the MFA is the same. I don't think there is any Nonfiction track at the U of U.

Ratemyprofessor is the worst resource ever to adjuciate what any professor would be like. Definitely a biased sample. Plus most of those listings are from undergraduates so they tend to mention little of the graduate level aspects.

I just realized why being a writer has been getting harder and harder with each year. I won't have an audience left in a decade. https://ktxs.com/news/local/they-cant-read-basic-sentences-college-students-facing-literacy-crisis

Just finished watching the new Wuthering Heights film at the theater tonight. Eh, interesting take on Emily Bronte but I am going to stick to the definitive 2011 version honestly at this point.

I am unsure about the updated version for ArtCenter policy. I know that they upped the acceptance rate to a rolling admissions for their MFA program so maybe you could be getting an interview later on this month or that part could be skipped and you just get admitted. That I wouldn't know atm.

That should be in March late or April.

Got word today about being rejected to the American Studies and Ethnicity program at USC this morning.

Checking to see if anyone applied or got into ArtCenter this year.

Interestingly enough, a recent NYT article addresses this very fact. https://archive.ph/D9z6y

Astonishingly, I do read some genre fiction myself. If you peruse my Goodreads, you can see that I have perused Jasmine Mas and even a romance novel by Lauren Kung Jessen most recently. So no, I really do enjoy genre fiction and in fact, as a post-postmodernist, I definitely can say that having my own work behave as a meta-commentary on genre fiction in relation to literary fiction is quite interesting. However, your argument isn't going to make me any less of a pessimist. And definitely I am not dismissive completely of the younger generation. in fact, Zoe Dubno's masterwork Happiness and Love is a definite must-read of this year (I got to message her privately just recently). Unfortunately, the a lot of the younger writers in the United States are getting much more homogenized at this stage of the literary trajectory with little to varying experimentation.

That's a definite no. Going to stick to being here in either Utah or LA.

Eh, perhaps but honestly I would subscribe more to this: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature Eric Bennett is definitely a super reliable source. And Mark McGurl definitely has way more weight as a literary and cultural critic than Tony Tulathimutte who tends to be more a clickbait provocateur in many ways. Plus I definitely as a communist leaning writer see Paul Engle's legacy as super detrimental. Bennett is dead on when he states "Much of the answer lies in the remarkable career of Paul Engle, the workshop’s second director, a do-it-yourself Cold Warrior whose accomplishments remain mostly covered in archival dust. For two decades after World War II, Iowa prospered on donations from conservative businessmen persuaded by Engle that the program fortified democratic values at home and abroad: It fought Communism. The workshop thrived on checks from places like the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave Iowa $40,000 between 1953 and 1956—good money at the time. As the years went by, it also attracted support from the Asia Foundation (another channel for CIA money) and the State Department. As for the hype, it followed the money and attracted more of it. The publishing moguls Henry Luce and Gardner Cowles Jr. conceived of themselves as fighting a battle of ideas, as they contrasted the American way of life with the gray Soviet nightmare on the pages of their newspapers and glossy magazines. Luce published Time and Life, Cowles published Look and several Midwestern newspapers, and both loved to feature Iowa: its embodiment of literary individualism, its celebration of self-expression, its cornfields. Knowing he could count on such publicity, Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City. He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union. He convened a celebration of Baudelaire with an eye toward the non-Communist left in Paris. He organized a festival of the sciences and arts. Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors. In 1954, Engle became the editor of the O. Henry Prize collection, and so it became his task to select the year’s best short stories and introduce them to a mass readership. Lo and behold, writers affiliated with Iowa began to be featured with great prominence in the collection. Engle marveled at this, the impartial fruits of his judging, in fund-raising pitches. The Iowa Workshop, then, attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War. But the creative-writing programs founded in Iowa’s image did not, in this respect, resemble it. No other program would be so celebrated on the glossy pages of Look and Life. No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest. No other program would attract such interest from the Asia Foundation, the State Department, and the CIA. And the anticlimax of the creative-writing enterprise must derive at least in part from this difference. There, in the paragraphs above, is blood squeezed from the stone of a dissertation. If, in 2006, as a no-longer-quite-plausibly aspiring novelist beached on the shores of academe, you’re struggling against the bleakness of the dissertation as a genre, you’ll do your best to work the CIA into yours. You’ll want to write a heroic dissertation—or at least a novelistic one. You’ll read books about soft diplomacy during the Cold War, learn about the Farfield Foundation, and search for its name, on an abject hunch, in the 40 boxes of the Papers of Paul Engle at the Special Collections Library at the University of Iowa. You’ll exhaust those archives and also the ones at Palo Alto (where Wallace Stegner founded the Stanford program) and Tarrytown (home of the Rockefeller archives), tracing the relationship between creative writing and the Cold War. But even as you do, you’ll wonder about your motives. Because you yourself attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before deciding to enter a Ph.D. program. At Iowa, you were disappointed by the reduced form of intellectual engagement you found there and the narrow definition of what counted as “literary.” The workshop was like a muffin tin you poured the batter of your dreams into. You entered with something undefined and tantalizingly protean and left with muffins. You really believe this. But you can also see yourself clearly enough: unpublished, ambitious, obscure, ponderous. In short, the kind of person who writes a dissertation. Were you right to be frustrated by the ethos of Iowa City, or are you merely a frustrated novelist? Were there objective grounds for your sense of creative stultification, or did the workshop simply not love you enough? Was the whole idea of your dissertation a guerrilla raid on the kind of recognition you couldn’t attain by legitimate means? And did the CIA really have much to do with it? At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1998 and 2000, I had the option of writing fiction in one of four ways. First, I could carve, polish, compress, and simplify; banish myself from my writing as T.S. Eliot advised and strive to enter the gray, crystalline tradition of modernist fiction as it runs from Flaubert through early Joyce and Hemingway to Raymond Carver (alumnus) and Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson (teacher) did this in her 1980 novel Housekeeping. Denis Johnson (alumnus) played devil to Robinson’s angel in Jesus’ Son. Frank Conroy (director, 1987-2005) had this style down cold—and it is cold. Conroy must have sought it in applications, longing with some kind of spiritual masochism to shiver again and again at the iciness of early Joyce. Such lapidary simplicity becomes psychedelic if you polish it enough. Justin Tussing (class ahead of me) mastered it in his prismatic novel, The Best People in the World. I myself, feeling the influence, revised sentences into pea gravel. Second, and also much approved, I could work in a warmer vein—the genuinely and winningly loquacious. Ethan Canin (my favorite teacher) set the example here, writing charismatically chatty prose that, like the man himself, exhibited the gross health of the fortunate and tenderhearted. Your influences, if you tended this way, were F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, or anybody else whose sentences unwind with glowing ease. Cheever loomed as an undisputed great. Curtis Sittenfeld, in the class below mine, displayed this style and charm and unassuming grace in Prep and American Wife. Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels, Gilead and Home, turn toward this manner from the adamantine beauty of Housekeeping. Third, you could write what’s often called “magical realism.” Joy Williams (alumna, teacher) and Stuart Dybek (alumnus, teacher) helped to shape a strain of fable-making passed down to my classmates from Kafka and Bruno Schulz and Calvino or their Latin American heirs. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was writing Madeleine Is Sleeping; Sarah Braunstein was developing the sensibility she’d weave into The Sweet Relief of Missing Children; Paul Harding was laying the groundwork for the enchanting weirdness of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers. These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was “postmodernism.” The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a “postmodern” story was like belching in class. But what is a postmodern story? In those years, Robinson was already in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, as were Jayne Anne Phillips (alumna) and Bobbie Ann Mason, model citizens of the M.F.A. nation. Joy Williams and Stuart Dybek were certainly not Victorians nor modernists nor best sellers. What was it that you weren’t supposed to do? At the time I considered Freud and Rabelais my favorite novelists. Later I understood that I was being annoying. But I thought then, and still think now, that the three-headed Iowa canon frustrated as much as satisfied a hunger for literature that got you thinking. Iowa fiction, published and unpublished, got you feeling—it got you seeing and tasting and touching and smelling and hearing. It was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more. People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines: on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and Continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was 23. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer. This aversion to novels and stories of full-throttle experience, erudition, and cognition—the unspoken proscription against attempting to write them—was the narrowness I sensed and hated. The question I wanted to answer, as I faced down my dissertation, was whether this aversion was an accidental feature of Iowa during my time, or if it reflected something more." As a writer who has been working for over 40 years since I wrote a novel from age 7-10 (now gone thank goodness), I definitely have shifted from an imitator of Hemingway and Carver when I was in elementary school to focused on a non-American and more British/Commonwealth method of literary writing today... Plus I really am glad to work on novel of ideas and themes that do not flinch away from the easy answer or resolved narrative structure. And that involved me having to rewrite a lot of the materials I have been working on 30 plus years into the mold I use today (two styles, one which is super complex and the other a lot more straightforward and playfully postmodern). To answer sort of the last question, I think we will be lucky if the world survives in a decade at this rate. I am definitely not putting any stock in our communal survival by any means. So in sum as an idealist I lean towards this: https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Future-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316300136 and as a pretty brutal realist: https://www.amazon.com/Submission-Novel-Michel-Houellebecq/dp/0374271577 Oh, and I should mention that you all should definitely read this: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/workshops-empire hilariously published by the University of Iowa Press (nodding irony here).

Yep I am definitely very pessimistic, more so than Melville. To quote: In the spirit of that historical perspective, here’s a sample of how Menand interprets McGurl’s approach: “The Program Era” is an impressive and imaginative book. It does three things unusually well. First it interprets works of fiction as what philosophers of language call illocutionary acts. The meaning of one of Raymond Carver’s stories is not only what the story says; it’s also the way the story says it. The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization of shame, a mode of self retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver…deal with the highbrow world of the academy. Rather ingeniously, McGurl reads the wok of Carver’s exact contemporary Joy Carol Oates as an expression of the same class-based self-consciousness…Oates is a prolific practitioner of what McGurl calls “maximalist” fiction: it has been said that, at one point in her career, she wrote forty pages of fiction every day, or about a quarter of what would constitute an entire book for Carver. But McGurl thinks that maximalism, too, is “a way of shielding oneself with words.” The two styles are methods of self-protection and, at the same time, forms of self-assertion: the minimalist writers puts his craft on display, the maximalist his facility. I just feel that everything today is dominated by self-promulgation, influencer culture, and autofiction during the past decade. I really also like this article: https://jacobin.com/2026/02/new-masses-proletarian-literature-wright-gold which points the direction of where I see my writing practice is heading towards.

This is partially correct methinks. I really do think that we need to have a more cynical view of the American creative writing factory system that churns out literary authors by the yard. One can blame the flattening of literary styles during the late 1970's and early 1980's to many trends: neoliberal capitalism, Reaganomics, a growing conservatism amongst the liberal elites, and the dominance of the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates/Cold War mentality in other MFA programs... a tragedy to diverse voices which were key to the ascendancy of American writing from the 1950's until early 1980's. Mark McGurl does such a good job delineating these academic trends in his masterly works: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092 and https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Less-Novel-Age-Amazon/dp/183976385X. In fact, I would argue in a pretty controversial way that Amazon and self-publishing have had more impact on literary writing during the past 20 years than even the MFA programs. Even though I have been writing for about 40 years now (and a lot of the folks in this thread are going to be mostly in 20's and 30's who wouldn't be contextualizing MFA applications in the same manner that I would), I definitely can attest that I am very interested in going to do a Ph.D. or MFA in creative writing for professionalization purposes (not workshopping really because I want to avoid all influences from the flattened styles that dominate literary magazines today particuarly in the US. Thankgodfor Irish and British literary magazines which I dig a lotatthispoint :p)... So I wouldn't be dismissing Ph.D. and MFA programs at this point completely in this summary case. You still need a MFA (or Ph.D.) and a publication (or a contracted publication) in order to teach at the university level for writing and that is my hope for the trajectory of my writing life at this point as I near my life of a half-century this fall. But for being a writer for the sake of art, definitely I see a lot of MFA programs (which proliferated so much after I got my English lit BA degree in 1997) mostly banking on making profitable authors, not writers whose works will be a testament to innovation or long-lasting provocations.