mfa programs versus the new york city

Slate has put up a six page article by Chad Harbach (the editor-in-chief of n+1, which makes a lot of sense now that I think about it) detailing the literary cultures of New York City publishers versus MFA programs. It’s influenced by Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, something I’ve been meaning to read since its release.  The most interesting bits are about how the differing culture means of book production affect the form of what’s being written, though I don’t know if those ideas presented belong to Chad or Mark. It’s a good read, though it doesn’t really take you anywhere you weren’t already. A bit for perusal:

There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments—though these abound—but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared to other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers—what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts—but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation—of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength—is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

Everyone knows this. But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way that this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, Calif., to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Mich., to Tallahassee, Fla. (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at the New Yorker offices on 42^nd Street). The superficial differences between these two cultures can be summed up charticle-style: short stories vs. novels; Amy Hempel vs. Jonathan Franzen; library copies vs. galley copies; Poets & Writers vs. the New York Observer; Wonder Boys vs. The Devil Wears Prada; the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference vs. the Frankfurt Book Fair; departmental parties vs. publishing parties; literary readings vs. publishing parties; staying home vs. publishing parties. But the differences also run deep. Each culture has its own canonical works and heroic figures; each has its own logic of social and professional advancement. Each affords its members certain aesthetic and personal freedoms while restricting others; each exerts its own subtle but powerful pressures on the work being produced.

for morning perusal

An interesting article went up on slate today by Meghan O’Rourke about women and unconscious bias in the literary world. Worth a read. Here’s a quote:

The literary debate of the fall is the tempest everyone is now calling, illogically, “Franzenfreude.” The storm, summarized hereby Ruth Franklin in TNR online, has encompassed a debate about the place of commercial fiction and whether Jonathan Franzen’s work is overrated. But I’m interested less in arguments about the relative merits of Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom—I’m halfway through and find it artful and engaging—and more in the deeper question raised by the debate: Namely, why women are so infrequently heralded as great novelists.

A thought exercise, perhaps specious: If this book had been written by a woman (say, Jennifer Franzen), would it have been called “a masterpiece of American fiction” in the first line of its front-page New York Times review; would its author, perhaps with longer hair and make-up, have been featured in Time as a GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST; would the Guardian have called it the “Book of the Century”? Without detracting from Franzen, I think we can say it would not have received this trifecta of plaudits, largely because we don’t ascribe literary authority as freely to women as men, and our models of literary greatness remain primarily male (and white).