BOOK NEWS: The Beats' negotiations with academia

The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation

EDITED BY ERIK MORTENSON AND TONY TRIGILIO 

Clemson UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781638040514

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781638040514

The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference presentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, translator, writer, and English faculty member at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Mortenson is also an avid translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines, and he is currently translating the work of Necmi Zekâ for a book-length project. Mortenson’s co-written memoir of his time in Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom, will appear from Cornerstone Press.

Tony Trigilio is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author and editor of fifteen books, including, most recently, Craft: A Memoir (forthcoming, Marsh Hawk Press, 2023) and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk, 2021). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is the author of Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois UP, 2012 [paper] and 2007 [cloth]) and "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coeditor of Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers UP, 2008). He is a founding member of the Beat Studies Association.

Book News: Creative writing programs, rebels in the academy

Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

BY LISE JAILLANT

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192855305

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/literary-rebels-9780192855305

How many times have you heard that creative writing programs are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favor a certain way of writing--preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This book argues against the notion that creative writing programs are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programs in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programs, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. 

As a discipline, creative writing strives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Historically, this opposition to scholars was so virulent that it often led to the separation of creative writing and literature departments. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in the 1930s, separated from the English department three decades later--and it still occupies a different building on campus, with little communication between writers and scholars. This model of institutional division is less common in Britain, where the discipline formally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.

• The first history of creative writing programs in Britain and America
• Sheds new light on the relationship between writers and scholars from the 1930s to the present day
• Draws on extensive work in neglected archives and oral history interviews with distinguished creative writers
• Offers a new model of scholarship in hybrid archives, comprising paper and born-digital documents

Lise Jaillant is senior lecturer (associate professor) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. She specializes in twentieth-century literary institutions, with a special interest in publishers and creative writing programs. She is author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014) and Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (EUP, 2017) and editor of Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (EUP, 2019). Taken together, these three books offer a broad overview of Anglo-American publishers in the early-twentieth-century, and their influence on the diffusion of modern literature.

Book News: The "craft labor" metaphor and literary production

Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture

BY CHRISTOPHER KEMPF

Johns Hopkins UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-1421443560

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12763/craft-class

The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor.

In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism.

Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?

Challenging conventional histories of arts and crafts ideology, Craft Class offers a provocative genealogy of the creative writing workshop. Creative writers, in addition to scholars of contemporary American literature, will find this well-written book appealing.   -- John Marsh, Pennsylvania State University, author of Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry

Kempf performs a wonderful excavation of the meaning of the 'workshop' for the discipline of creative writing, demonstrating how it arose as a deeply human response to the problem of alienated labor in an industrial capitalist society. In a series of brilliantly chosen and illuminating case studies, he discloses the true historical significance of the craft ideal nurtured in such spaces, reawakening us to the utopian energies that circulate in the writing classroom even now.   -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Christopher Kempf is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at the University of Illinois. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Chicago, he is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost and Late in the Empire of Men.