America's Two Literary Cultures

A good article over at Slate argues that America has two literary cultures. The first is stuck in the universities in the form of MFA programs. The second is a product of the New York publishing industrial complex. Here's a few choice quotes:

"On the flip side (as McGurl can't quite know, because he attended "real" grad school), MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students' work—especially shocking if you're the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market."


"New York can't be excelled at two things: superstardom and forgetfulness. And so the New York "canon," at any given moment, tends to consist of a few perennial superstars—Roth, DeLillo, Pynchon, Auster—whose reputations, paradoxically, are secure at least until they die, and beneath whom circulate an ever changing group of acclaimed young novelists—Joshua Ferris, Nicole Krauss, Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Safran Foer—and a host of midcareer writers whose names are magnified when they put out a book and shrink in between. Except at the very top, reputation in this world depends directly on the market and the publishing cycle, the reviews and the prizes, and so all except those at the very top have little reason to hope for a durable readership. The contemporary New York canon tends to be more contemporary than canon—it consists of popular new novels, and previous books by the authors of same."

 

A pressing question for our generation:

Who said it, Kanye West or Tracy Jordan?
Linkity Link.

Zadie Smith Reviews "The Social Network"

but ends up thinking a lot about our generation and what it means to live online. It is a great critique of the film and a good model for non-ivory tower (dare I say popular?) film/lit/art criticism.