| From the 1930s through the mid-1960s, influential figures behind the rise of creative writing programs at colleges and universities in the United States took an international view of literature and regarded writers as essential to civic health and world peace. With gathering urgency in the postwar era, they believed that individuals expressing themselves might provide a crucial stay against the proliferating threat of totalitarian impersonality; and that leftwing bohemian dissent---like that of writers in Paris and Greenwich Village before the war---could be contained, observed, and diminished on campus. In the 1960s, graduates of the original creative writing programs founded scores of new ones. This second phase differed in spirit from the first, reflecting the transition from notions of universal high culture to the politics of personal identity as well as the professionalization of the discipline.;In this dissertation I explore the intra- and extramural aspects of this initial, imperial phase in MFA workshops. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted at Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and the Rockefeller Archive Center, I argue that creative writing programs developed in a time already strikingly remote from our own, and that their structure and spirit today bear traces of a forgotten past. In the 1940s and 1950s, the programs provided a major site for the assimilation of modernist literature to the college curriculum, a site that differed in means and ends from the contemporaneous New Critical classroom but that just as powerfully transformed our ideas about writers and writing. The texts that were canonized and the techniques that were taught reflected ideological concerns as well as pedagogical and artistic principles. Grasping the ideology, the pedagogy, and the aesthetics at the heart of the discipline enables surprising new readings of familiar texts; it illuminates what MFA programs are and are not; and it clarifies our understanding of the relationship between literature, the academy, and the nation then and now. |
