McGurl’s book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It’s a history of
twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati
Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so
many writers now pass… The Program Era is an impressive and imaginative
book.
-- Louis Menand New Yorker
McGurl’s study rises
above the conventional thinking to draw some surprising conclusions about how the proliferation
of creative writing courses has shaped American literature for over half a century… The
Program Era is an intelligent, persuasive and thought-provoking book; by shifting the
focus away from individual writers towards the institutions that nurtured (or inhibited) them,
McGurl breaks new critical ground.
-- Patrick Langley Times Literary
Supplement
[A] magisterial book… [It’s a] magnificent and unique
theoretical construction [McGurl] has achieved in The Program
Era.
-- Fredric Jameson London Review of
Books
The Program Era juxtaposes an unlikely
cast of writers between its covers: Flannery O‘Connor, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond
Carver, Philip Roth, George Saunders, and on. McGurl positions this diverse crew squarely in the
context of the remarkable growth of creative writing programs in the U.S. after World War Two.
McGurl‘s reinterpretation of these writers, whom scholars have so often read separately from one
another, promises to unsettle all the standard ways literary historians carve up the postwar
world of letters. McGurl has a rare talent for writing literary criticism that smuggles its
theoretical concepts into your brain under the cover of lucid and readable and unpretentious
prose. Academic literary critics, perhaps by necessity, spend lots of time becoming specialists
in their patch of intellectual turf and speaking only to each other in an ever-subdividing
glossolalia of theory. If we’re lucky, McGurl‘s book will inaugurate for us a new genre of
literary history that, though wholly intelligible to the general reader, doesn’t pull its
punches or water down the complexity of its vision.
-- Lee Konstantinou The
Believer
What has the movement of postwar writing into the
university done to our literature?… The obvious nature of this question only places the
decades-long lack of a proper answer in higher relief. It is proportionately exhilarating to
find, in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a brilliant and comprehensive mind
developing one at last. McGurl trains his gaze on the university writing programs and some of
the masterful novelists they have incubated. But he makes his most compelling arguments at the
level of the writer’s practical place in the academy, examining the distorting (and enabling)
effects of university discipline on individual artists, and considering the wider role of
‘creative writing’ within a chain of notions of creativity (lasting from high school to the
service-economy workplace) that inculcate skills for late-capitalist life… McGurl gives the best
account I have seen of [Flannery] O’Connor’s cruel maximization of ‘ironic distance’; in her
third-person narration, she aspires, as he puts it, almost ‘to the unimaginable condition of
fourth person narration—narration from a higher dimension.’ His pages on Raymond Carver and ’80s
minimalism, a mode that ‘came to be seen, oversimplifying the case drastically, as the ‘house
style’ of the creative writing program,’ are similarly unrivaled… McGurl’s clear-sighted
exposure of the hidden institutional background of postwar literary production is one of the
first reliable signs that we will finally see that era thoroughly anatomized in a new generation
of scholarship.
-- Mark Greif Bookforum
[A] fascinating
and (at times) beautifully argued book… [It] introduced me to many forgotten or unfairly
neglected authors whose books I will seek out, as well as provocatively repositioning unlikely
authors such as Raymond Carver as academic intellectuals.
-- Matt Thorne Catholic
Herald
McGurl performs a complicated series of critical and
interpretive maneuvers in The Program Era. He describes in detail how the
institutionalization of creative writing ‘has transformed the conditions under which American
literature is produced’ and how that has ‘converted the Pound Era into the Program
Era.’
-- Jennifer Howard Chronicle of Higher
Education
A remarkably generous, unusually inclusive, and
irresistibly buoyant work of literary criticism and scholarship.
-- Brian Lennon
Electronic Book Review
[There’s] much food for thought in what
[McGurl] has to say about literary trends. Most, interesting, though, is his sensitive
exploration of the interplay between individual writers and the Creative Writing programs…
Opinionated and lively… He delivers a cornucopia of exciting new ideas and insights in a work
which will be indispensable reading for teachers and students of creative writing, and for
anyone interested in modern fiction… [A] complex, energetic and fascinating book.
--
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Irish Times
McGurl does have some smart things
to say about the evolution of this creative writing movement—he documents it as part of the rise
of progressive education in general—and about the many paradoxes involved when universities get
in the business of trying to structure, codify and reward artistic endeavor.
-- Charles
McGrath New York Times
If you find postwar American fiction
interesting, you may wish to explore the academic system that begat it: a story well told by
The Program Era.
-- David Gewanter Times Higher Education
Supplement
It is a cliché to say that a book so changes your
view of a particular historical period or problem that you never see it the same old way again.
But this is the kind of book that warrants such praise. McGurl has brought deep learning,
sweeping ambition, and stylistic brio together here to produce a whole new story of postwar
American fiction. There is nothing else like it on the shelves of contemporary literary
criticism.
-- Jim English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards,
and the Circulation of Cultural Value
The
Program Era is a brilliant book of great ambition and originality. It will be rightly
regarded as a landmark work and will shape the critical understanding of postwar American
literature and culture for many years to come.
-- Sean McCann, author of A
Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential
Government
The institutionalized teaching of creative
writing thrives in America. In Mark McGurl’s wide-ranging, audacious study, the academy comes to
define postwar fiction in surprising ways. You won’t think of most of your favorite authors
quite the same way again.
-- Ed Park, author of Personal
Days
