Mark McGurl - Böcker

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature.McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison.Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university.An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

Once upon a time there were good American novels and bad ones, but none was thought of as a work of art. The Novel Art tells the story of how, beginning with Henry James, this began to change. Examining the late-nineteenth century movement to elevate the status of the novel, its sources, paradoxes, and reverberations into the twentieth century, Mark McGurl presents a more coherent and wide-ranging account of the development of American modernist fiction than ever before. Moving deftly from James to Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, and Djuna Barnes among others, McGurl argues that what unifies this diverse group of ambitious writers is their agonized relation to a middling genre rarely included in discussions of the fine arts. He concludes that the new product, despite its authors' desire to distinguish it from popular forms, never quite forsook the intimacy the genre had long cultivated with the common reader. Indeed, the "art novel" sought status within the mass market, and among its prime strategies was a promotion of the mind as a source of value in an economy increasingly dependent on mental labor.McGurl also shows how modernism's obsessive interest in simple-mindedness revealed a continued concern with the masses even as it attempted to use this simplicity to produce a heightened sophistication of form. Masterfully argued and set in elegant prose, The Novel Art provides a rich new understanding of the fascinating road the American novel has taken from being an artless enterprise to an aesthetic one.