The Program Era

Author : Mark McGurl
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674054245
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Loren Glass
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609384393
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book After the Program Era written by Loren Glass and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-01-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 12. "My Ghost Life": Russell Banks and the Limits of Aesthetic Democracy - Sean McCann -- Chapter 13. Getting Real: From Mass Modernism to Peripheral Realism - Donal Harris -- Chapter 14. From Modernism to Metamodernism: Quantifying and Theorizing the Stages of the Program Era - Seth Abramson -- Afterword. And Then What? - Mark McGurl -- Contributors -- Index

Author : Eric Bennett
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609383729
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Workshops of Empire written by Eric Bennett and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.

Author : Mark McGurl
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674266021
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Mark McGurl
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 183976385X
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Everything and Less written by Mark McGurl and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Best Book of Fall (Esquire) and a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 (Lit Hub) What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica. Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place.

Author : Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674417070
Total Pages : 379 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Track Changes written by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing in the digital age has been as messy as the inky rags in Gutenberg’s shop or the molten lead of a Linotype machine. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the early adopters, and what made others anxious? Was word processing just a better typewriter, or something more?

Author : Merve Emre
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022647402X
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Paraliterary written by Merve Emre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.

Author : Neil Landau
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 135178420X
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book TV Writing On Demand written by Neil Landau and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TV Writing On Demand: Creating Great Content in the Digital Era takes a deep dive into writing for today’s audiences, against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving TV ecosystem. Amazon, Hulu and Netflix were just the beginning. The proliferation of everything digital has led to an ever-expanding array of the most authentic and engaging programming that we’ve ever seen. No longer is there a distinction between broadcast, cable and streaming. It’s all content. Regardless of what new platforms and channels will emerge in the coming years, for creators and writers, the future of entertainment has never looked brighter. This book goes beyond an analysis of what makes great programming work. It is a master course in the creation of entertainment that does more than meet the standards of modern audiences—it challenges their expectations. Among other essentials, readers will discover how to: Satisfy the binge viewer: analysis of the new genres, trends and how to make smart initial decisions for strong, sustainable story. Plus, learn from the rebel who reinvented an entire format. Develop iconic characters: how to foster audience alignment and allegiance, from empathy and dialogue to throwing characters off their game, all through the lens of authenticity and relatability. Create a lasting, meaningful career in the evolving TV marketplace: how to overcome trips, traps and tropes, the pros and cons of I.P.; use the Show Bible as a sales tool and make the most of the plethora of new opportunities out there. A companion website offers additional content including script excerpts, show bible samples, interviews with television content creators, and more.

Author : Evan Brier
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812201442
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Novel Marketplace written by Evan Brier and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-25 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place—Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.

Author : William H. Butler
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351033360
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A New Era for Collaborative Forest Management written by William H. Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and identifies lessons learned for governance and policy through this new and innovative approach to collaborative forest management. Unlike anything else in US public land management, the CFLRP is a nationwide program that requires collaboration throughout the life of national forest restoration projects, joining agency partners and local stakeholder groups in a kind of decade-long restoration marriage. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the governance dynamics of the program, examining: questions about collaborative governance processes and the dynamics of trust, accountability and capacity; how scientific information is used in making decisions and integrated into adaptive management processes; and the topic of collaboration through implementation, an underdeveloped area of collaborative governance literature. Bringing together chapters from a community of social science and policy researchers who have conducted studies across multiple CFLRP projects, this volume generates insights, not just about the program, but also about dynamics that are central to collaborative and landscape approaches to land management and relevant for broader practice. This volume is a timely and important contribution to environmental governance scholarship. It will be of interest to researchers and students of natural resource management, environmental governance, and forestry, as well as practitioners and policy makers involved in forest and ecosystem restoration efforts, and collaborative natural resource management more broadly.