Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id842239880
After World War II, creative writing programs taught that good literature required, “Sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.”³ These departments sought to discourage abstract thoughts about systemic social issues and instead focus on the problems of the individual. This movement was spearheaded by Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He solicited funds from the Farfield Foundation, which was a front for the Center for Cultural Freedom. In exchange for these donations, he advanced the individualist Western values the CIA wanted to see.
✏️ CIA funds, funneled thru this Farfield Foundation (which by the way also provided money to get american abstract art propaganda all around europe), went into creative writing programs that shifted cultural values away from systemic social issues and towards individual issues. They funded the individualist western value. 🔗 View Highlight
id842240121
the Iowa Writer’s Workshop “wanted literary craft to be a pyramid.”⁴ At the foundation were grammar and syntax, or “Meaning, Sense, Clarity… Then came character, then metaphor… everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as ‘the fancy stuff.’ At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.” By treating any kind of abstract or political content like the junk food at the top of the food pyramid, only to be indulged in sparingly, he effectively stifled a generation of writers’ willingness to talk about anything beyond the immediate problems of the individual.
id842240143
novelists like Tolstoy, Melville, and Hugo indulging in long diversions to discuss political or philosophical concepts, this was discouraged in 20th century classrooms.
id842240397
“The continued status of ‘show, don’t tell,’ a self-evident truth, dutifully dispensed to anyone who ventures into a creative writing class, is one proof of their success.” While this adage is often attributed to Anton Chekhov or Ernest Hemingway, it was seized on with the intention of making it difficult to talk about any social issues — outside of how they created direct obstacles for the main character. “The goal, according to Bennett, was to discourage the abstract theorizing and systematic social critiques to which the radical literature of the 1930s had been prone, in favor of a focus on the personal, the concrete and the individual.”
id842240791
Treating political themes as a sort of excess that artists should be trained to avoid leaves political narratives to be controlled by those with no fear of forcing their worldview on others.