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Naomi Kanakia's avatar

Always amused by MFA discourse. It is insane to ask aspiring writers to do an MFA in their thirties, when they ought to be making progress towards becoming householders. Just a radical, radical mixup of the stakes of life. If the truly did in any way fit a person for writing better, it might be justifiable as an interruption of one's prime ears of earning and education, but since it doesn't, it's much better relegated to one's twenties.

Given the love in literature for both mediocre writing and for the ingenue, I would say it's much better to succeed in one's youth with a mediocre first novel and then have time for more ambitious work later. The only issue is that if you are overpraised for bad work then you won't know you need to do better. But that's a much better problem than to toil in obedient obscurity for years and years and discover in the end that nobody wants what you are selling.

Obviously all requests for advice are phrased as "how can I write well?" instead of "How can I succeed as a writer?" But in practice very few people have the integrity to believe in their own vision--some exterior validation is generally a necessary catalyst in a writer's development. The MFA if it does anything (doubtful), provides this catalyst by telling young writers that they have promise. To ask people to believe in their own promise for decades, in the absence of exterior validation, will be far more corrosive to their abilities and determination than early ambition might be.

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John Pistelli's avatar

That sounds right to me. I didn't get an MFA, but I always assumed the main benefit was the connections you made. Otherwise, if you're going to be in school anyway, the reading for an English PhD is in my view more useful to a writer, hence my utopian vision of blending the curricula.

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Naomi Kanakia's avatar

I did one from age 26 to 28. It's not even the connections, it's mostly the invisible acculturation. Like how everyone who goes to Harvard ends up looking and sounding the same, even if they come from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. You just look and sound like an upper middle class professional. The MFA is that but for writers. Best to get it over with asap. The MFA homogenizes the work obviously, but to a far smaller degree than the industry does. Thus it's a very early sort of labor discipline, teaching you the skills (sucking up, looking smart, writing glittering highly polished sentences) that you need to make it in the high culture end of capitalism. Yes it's possible to resist the homogenizing effect of the MFA--most of my classmates did, but the ones who resisted the best are the ones who are still unpublished and the ones who resisted least are most successful.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Ah, well, in that case, the PhD has the same effect!

Re: what I think of as the "no-writers-older-than-Flannery" problem, it's the main thing I hold against the MFA programs and why I find so much contemporary fiction so shallow. You want to write a novel and you're not going to read George Eliot? Come on! Obviously you don't want to create some kitschy pastiche of older forms, but you need a wide range of models to work with, and a deep sense of the possibilities of the language. They're trying to "make it new" without the "it."

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Naomi Kanakia's avatar

There's a Norwegian writer I like, Dag Solstad, and one of his books is about a writer who has a nervous breakdown while teaching Ibsen's THE WILD DUCK, because he realizes not just that the students are bored (he is used to them being bored), but that they're not even ashamed of being bored. They just dont think this is even notionally important.

Similarly I don't expect MFAs to make people into good writers, but I do expect them to be temples to literature. It is nuts that students graduate MFAs without even being exposed to the notion that they ought to have read Middlemarch. And at this point it's because their teachers likely haven't either! We got one mfa generation teaching the next here. Seems so insane how English and CW programs are on such dual tracks, given that most CW profs were English majors as undergrads. In this the CW resembles other professional schools. Like if you go to a sociology department, people will say things like "we should consider the positionality of knowledge when reading scientific texts" and somehow in education and social work depts that gets translated into "rationality is a western, imperialist constuct". Like, when the theorists get too separated from the practitioners, then the latter start making their own theory, to disastrous results. As you mentioned, most MFAs programs would give much better off if they were subsumed under English departments and operated as lucrative sidelines, for getting fees and increasing enrollments. At least then Ocean Vuong could subsidize George Eliot.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Yes, and the MFA attitude is weirdly the *more* academic mentality, as if to say the most recent peer-reviewed research is all you need. E.g., some tech bro was asking the other day why, since scientists don't read Newton and Darwin, do philosophers still read Plato and Aristotle? And the reason is so scientists don't make their own theory, just as you say. Definitely agreed about the needed structural reform.

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Naomi Kanakia's avatar

It is striking that MFA programs very rarely assign writers from outside the MFA era. Even Hemingway and Faulkner are rarer on lists. It's like there's a handful between the mfa curriculum and the English curriculum. Eventually writers become a dead letter--you aren't allowed to be actively influenced by them anymore--and that's when they become the preserve of the English department ;)

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Naomi Kanakia's avatar

Stages of life

If the mfa truly did

One's prime years

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Tardigrade_Sonata's avatar

A lot of MFA discourse focuses on the content (of writing “craft” or the reading lists) or — as Naomi mentions — their role as a sort of early validation/motivation (should I actually try to spend my life doing this?) but almost never frankly acknowledged is their function as an ersatz artistic milieu, a sort of establishment provided scene or set. And obviously this goes for film school and other types of MFAs. I have wondered about this in relation to the cost of urban living rising over time (I guess in the 20s you could just move to Paris, or Greenwich Village in the 50s, etc.). Surely there’s more to it than that, maybe a Laschian thing where young people consciously (or not) feel more at ease if the PMC/academic blob curates their Kunstleroman. But it also represents a huge (if gradual) shift in the last 100 years toward writing fiction as a vocation being a respectable path for the children of the upper-middle class. I really do think very different sorts of people are represented in the MFA bloc now, who carry with them more practical/careerist/bourgeois attitudes toward the whole thing (and maybe that’s self-sustaining and a consequence of assortative mating - I read somewhere recently that tenure-track professors in the humanities are more likely to be the children of professors than at any time in the past, which is wild). For the record I enjoyed my MFA, but almost never think of it! Lol. At least in the sense of having learned many deep artistic truths in workshop. We did have an elective Ulysses seminar, and even read some Austen and Baudelaire, but yes it was slanted terribly post-1940s.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Yes, the "scene" idea. I observed the MFA cohorts come and go when I did my PhD and didn't detect an enormous amount of scene energy, but maybe the University of Minnesota isn't the place to look for that.

(One alum made the Booker shortlist this year, but I don't remember if I ever met him. I think maybe in passing. I definitely did meet someone else on the shortlist, but not through an MFA program; rather because he's a friend of a friend from my PhD program. In that sense, it's been my best Booker shortlist ever; now if only I'd read any of the novels...)

Ironic (or predictable) how writing became "a respectable path" for the already elite at the same time as it stopped being something you could make money at. (Making money via publishing was traded for publishing as currency in the academic job market. I'd take the money! But then I am not a child of the upper middle class.) So, just like the old days, a quasi-aristocratic pasttime.

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Tardigrade_Sonata's avatar

I mean actual aristocrats might be preferable to “pleasure to have in class” meritocrats who say things like [shudder] “literary community.” Also notable, I think, that the MFA doesn’t seem to have much purchase outside the Anglosphere.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Right, I was asking "quasi" to do too much work. Aristocrats could read Greek! (Cue my theory about the irrepressible popularity of The Secret History as evidence that everyone knows something's missing from humanities education, if not ritual murder exactly.)

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