The Program Era

McGurl, Mark

doi:10.2307/j.ctvjsf59f

Cited by 511 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Through the MFA-CW we have witnessed a wide-scale change in the coordination of the literary arts in the United States since the 1960s, based on a model founded in Iowa in the mid-1930s. This change--the proliferation of advanced degrees in creative writing, especially pronounced in the last decade--has been credited with fundamentally reshaping American arts and letters (McGurl, 2009). While the emergence and rise of a new post-graduate degree program more broadly might be explained through research on occupational closure and human capital theory, these theoretical trajectories seem less applicable to the case of the MFA-CW.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The MFA in Creative Writing: The Uses of a “Useless” Credential

Childress

Gerber

2015

P&P

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Over half of today's Masters of Fine Arts programs in creative writing in the United States were founded after the year 2000. Has the MFA-CW become a necessary credential for novelists? Relying on participant observation field research in the American literary field and interviews with authors, publishers, MFA graduates, and instructors, this work focuses on a paradox: Despite widespread agreement that the credential doesn't "teach" enrollees to be a good writers or open up a pathway to a professional writing career, many involved in the literary field hold an MFA-CW. In this paper, we look at the uses of the MFA-CW, finding that although the degree serves little if any jurisdictional or closure-related functions it is made useful in a variety of ways: for students as a symbolic resource for artistic identity, for working writers as a source of income and community, and for editors in publishing houses as a signal for possible marketing and publicity potential.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The MFA in Creative Writing: The Uses of a “Useless” Credential

Childress

Gerber

2015

P&P

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“…He makes a political argument for what Mark McGurl has dubbed "high cultural pluralism," literature that unites preoccupations with cultural difference and modernist aesthetics, a boon, thinks Ellison, for a nation ostensibly committed to social equality but divided by racism. 37 Immediately upon its founding, the NEA feared that conglomeration threatened literature's diversity. As the NEA was getting up and running in the late 1960s, the publishing industry's first wave of conglomeration began its work of consolidation.…”

Section: : Neamentioning

confidence: 99%

Against Conglomeration

Sinykin¹,

Roland²

2021

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House's Allan Kornblum and Milkweed's Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público's Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press's Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive's John O'Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Nonprofits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers' finances-conglomerate and nonprofit-created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of

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“…Elkins, 2009; Harbach, 2014), but has been relatively underconsidered in social scientific studies of the arts, creative industries, and artistic careers. Instead, now deeply entrenched in what McGurl (2009) refers to as “the program era” of American arts and letters, much research and reporting on the arts in the United States has focused on the experiences and outcomes of students in these programs (Frenette & Tepper, 2016; Jahoda et al, 2014; Lam, 2014; Lena & Lindemann, 2014; Pink, 2004).…”

Section: Background: the Rise Of Arts Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This has led to a strong alternative market for artists’ time and skills and contributed new wrinkles to the complex relationship between artistic autonomy and market activity. Artistic training in the United States has undergone a professionalization process that has included emphases on theoretical knowledge and credentials and a more general move to school culture (McGurl, 2009; Singerman, 1999). The still-increasing numbers of students in formal artistic training has resulted in a flowering of arts education as a legitimate career path for “real” artists, rather than the holding ground for “failed” artists that, according to our archival data, it was often assumed to be as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.…”

Section: Data and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

The Economic World Obverse: Freedom Through Markets After Arts Education

Gerber

Childress

2017

American Behavioral Scientist

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What role does arts education play in artistic activity and income? In light of the rise of university arts education and its effects, especially the changing role of teaching in artistic careers, this paper questions key assumptions of both winner-take-all and economic-worldreversed analyses of artistic careers. While almost all studies of remuneration in the creative arts find that income is highly skewed, these dominant perspectives take an object-oriented view of artistic life that neglects the vast majority of activities that underpin and compose contemporary arts practices. Looking at arts practices more holistically and using the changing status of art teaching as an exemplar of the expanded field of artistic practice, we document the challenges that the rise of arts education present to traditional analyses of artistic careers, income, and success.

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The Program Era

Cited by 511 publications

References 0 publications

The MFA in Creative Writing: The Uses of a “Useless” Credential

The MFA in Creative Writing: The Uses of a “Useless” Credential

Against Conglomeration

The Economic World Obverse: Freedom Through Markets After Arts Education

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