On Teaching and Writing Fiction by Wallace Stegner

Author:Wallace Stegner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

□ Has our literature been influenced, in any particular manner or to any appreciable extent, by the fact that the teaching of creative writing has, here in America, been so preponderantly centered within colleges and universities?

That is hard to say. The writing that goes on in colleges and universities, both by students and by teachers, is likely to be as free from commercial pressures as writing anywhere. And that is both a safety and a danger, for whatever one may say about commercial pressures, they do squeeze out some of the lunatic fringe.

A coterie within an English department does just the opposite—encourages the experimental (and, sometimes, lunatic), with the assumption that it is “purer” than the writing that has publication as its goal. English departments’ writing programs are not always hermetic, but there is that danger.

I doubt that the fads which sweep English departments—everything from the New Humanism to Reduction-ism—have much effect on the actual writing of the country, which is incorrigibly closer to life than the fads are.

But it is possible that a discerning critic might find in the literature of the last four or five decades—the period during which writing has established itself in our schools—a greater tendency to split hairs, a somewhat greater openness to the formation of “schools” (in the European sense), and a somewhat greater willingness to “experiment”—experiment being generally imitation of Joyce, who otherwise has not had an enormous influence on the art of fiction in America.

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