Chronicle of Higher Education, SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
How America Taught the World to Write Small
It exported a literature of individualism and domesticity — not one of solidarity and big ideas.
By Eric Bennett

In 2017 I flew to Seattle for an Association of Writers & Writing Programs panel on “Postcolonial Perspectives on Workshops of Empire.” As the author of Workshops of Empire, I gave concluding remarks, rehearsing its thesis for what I expected to be the last time.

That thesis goes something like this: Even today, the institutions of creative writing in the United States reflect their origins in the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, early advocates for such programs, including Paul Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford, shared a common vision for American culture with the internationalists of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and influential philanthropic foundations. With public and private funding and a nod from the State Department, Stegner and Engle traveled internationally to promote American modernist literature — at least, a version of it friendly to capitalism and hospitable to democracy. Their promotion of American values fostered a literature of individualism and domesticity and suppressed a literature of solidarity and big ideas. Insofar as American writers still render the bedroom or kitchen more deftly than the zeitgeist or the world situation, they reflect the academic commitments of a bygone age.

That day at AWP, intoning my pitch, my tail wasn’t quite between my legs, but it wasn’t wagging, either. I had lost confidence that my thesis was worth the breath it took to rehash it. A version that appeared in these pages in 2014 (“How Iowa Flattened Literature”) had been rebuffed as sensationalistic and conspiratorial. The packaging of the article highlighted the discovery that the CIA had funded international writing at Iowa, and this detail distracted from the larger argument — that ideological complacency had hampered generations of writers. The essay soured my relationship with the University of Iowa Press (which was preparing, at the time, to publish my book), provoked eye rolls among Iowa alumni, and angered Christopher Merrill, the director of the International Writing Program at Iowa. That week, eager to minimize the CIA funding, he dressed me down on Iowa Public Radio, accusing me of speculation, innuendo, and lies.

I had hoped that my research would encourage the bolstering of historical consciousness in the culture of the American MFA and help contemporary writers in whatever small way to transcend the narrow bounds of neoliberal individualism and to write big. But as I discovered to my astonishment that day in Seattle, the thesis mattered most for those who had lived through the history I was reciting — not in the Western hemisphere, but in the East.

The Filipina poet and scholar Conchitina Cruz spoke up, transmuting the lead of theory into the gold of an astonishing historical example. In 1946, Edilberto Tiempo enrolled at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, overlapping with Flannery O’Connor. They were the two students in class (the legend goes) with accents too thick to be understood by their classmates — both had to have their stories read aloud by others. A year later, Edilberto’s wife, Edith, matriculated too.

In 1951, having returned to the Philippines, the Tiempos founded a creative-writing program at Silliman University in Dumaguete. In 1962, they added the National Summer Writers Workshop. Both programs thrived and even today remain arbiters of literary prestige in the Philippines. What’s more, their early literary outlook, adopted straight from the workshops at Iowa, has shaped literary production in the Philippines for over half a century, and hardly for the better.

Cruz discusses the Tiempos in a 2017 article in the journal Kritika Kultura, “The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer: The Tiempo Age and Institutionalized Creative Writing in the Philippines.” She is unstinting in her conclusions: Via the Tiempos, Iowa flattened literature in the former American colony. Instructors encouraged their students to center fiction and poetry on personal and aesthetic experience rather than on political or historical concerns. Poems, stories, and novels were to be written in English, not Filipino or any of the other languages on the islands. “In downplaying the role of literature in social transformation,” Cruz argues, the Tiempo regime “authorizes the production of apolitical and de-historicized, if not assimilationist and antinationalist, literature.”

The panel audience and I did not have to take Cruz’s word for it. Someone stood up during the Q&A and said, “That’s exactly what happened to me.” That was Gina Apostol, a novelist from the Philippines who had attended a Silliman Summer Workshop in 1985. She had long been on the record with her discontents. In a piquant 2007 essay, she likened the New Criticism of the 1950s, so influential among the Tiempo set even in the 1980s, to Spam: an unhealthy American import preposterously offered up as natural. At Silliman she claims she “felt a kind of castration (for a woman writer always has balls, you know)” and argued that the “Filipino short story in English, as defined by Silliman, seemed too narrow for my — or my country’s — interests.” This was not diffuse colonial influence. It was lineage and design. What the Tiempos learned from Engle they codified at the expense of the literary fate of a nation, and writers today are still fighting it.

The Filipino case, as it turns out, is but one small part of the story. The United States, an expanding empire after 1945, exerted hegemonic influence over every nation it courted, bankrolled, invaded, or assassinated the democratically elected leader of. Creative writing played its part. A growing group of scholars, from Japan to China to the United Kingdom to North America, is finally bringing the picture into view. They’re asking: How much were writers warped and coerced? And how valiantly did they resist?

The Philippines presents the worst-case scenario: a former American colony tempted by imperial prestige to embrace and preserve the anti-ideological poetics that served the interest of the dominant power. But the Iowa effect has run a fascinating gamut.

In his 2017 American Literary History article “The Invention of the Global MFA” Richard Jean So likens the literary campaigns of Paul Engle to the social-scientific campaigns of Wilbur Schramm, the first director of the Iowa program. After quitting creative writing, Schramm, in the 1950s, became a pioneer in communications studies who promoted propaganda as a means to train Asians in “empathy” — precisely the virtue that Engle espoused in the Workshop (Schramm’s bibliography includes a telling range of titles: from The Story Workshop in 1938, to The Reds Take a City in 1951, to The Nature of Psychological Warfare in 1954.)

Fiction writers’ preferred tool for engendering empathy (So argues) is “free indirect discourse,” that is, the bending of omniscient third-person narration to meld with the voice of a character. It’s a venerable trick of the trade with a history stretching back to Jane Austen. Three talented writers affiliated with Iowa — Bai Xianyong, Lin Huaimin, and Engle’s wife and co-program director, Hualing Nieh — each assimilated the technique without being dominated by it. “These writers,” So concludes, “may have all experienced the trauma of exile that afflicted so many East Asians after the war, and they may have all come to Iowa to study creative writing, but they adapted what they learned there, especially [free indirect discourse], to the particularities of their lived situations.” The tools of the imperial power, in other words, got appropriated and subverted and put to good use.

The scholar Yi-hung Liu has documented a similarly mixed legacy. Her dissertation on Iowa suggests that the program often deepened rather than diminished the political commitments of creative writers from Asia. In the 1970s, the International Writing Program became a haven for Baodiao-movement activists — those who assert the right of Chinese sovereignty over the Diaoyu islands — and did so with the quiet consent of Hualing Nieh. An Iowa journal, edited by two writers in residence from Hong Kong, denounced the “two Chinas” proposal as “an international conspiracy.” “There’s Only One China!” the editorial put it, subtly.

This was not diffuse colonial influence. It was lineage and design.

Often being thrown in together helped writers from different parts of the Chinese sphere of influence write better. In a recent Chinese Literature Today article, Po-hsi Chen explores the creative relationship between Wang Anyi and Chen Yingzhen at the International Writing Program in 1983, arguing that despite “the anti-communist nature of the IWP, Chen’s socialist ideals and his religious faith provided Wang with a concentric framework to first situate China and Chinese literature within a worldly context.” Iowa, by not being China, gave Wang new perspectives on China.

The American poet James Shea, who teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University, demonstrates in a 2019 article in Writing in Practice that the poet Dai Tian imported back to Hong Kong much from Iowa. Like the Tiempos, and like countless American creative writers, he learned from the workshop to be concrete and personal and vernacular rather than sweeping and thinky and elevated. Like the Tiempos, he founded creative-writing classes that spread the gospel. But Dai also discovered in the American milieu of the late 1960s the countercultural currents that were sweeping away the norms of the early Cold War. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Allen Ginsberg became influences, and his post-Iowa poetry strikes a markedly anticolonial tone, protesting British control of his home city.

In sum, the Iowa experience did for some Asian writers what history can do for any writer. It transformed how they understood themselves. It placed them in an alienating context that threw into relief what mattered least and what mattered most back home. In some cases, the extended visit helped to wean writers from their slavish assimilation of Western poetics. For instance, with help from Iowa, the European-flavored New Literature of 1920s Taiwan and the modernist resurgence there in the 1960s gave way by the 1970s to a renewed interest in regional forms of expression. In every case, the time abroad became one of three or four (or five or 10) ingredients that fertilized powerful new developments.

Scholars working on the influence of the Iowa writing programs on Asia recently gathered in a virtual symposium centered in Hong Kong. I gave opening remarks from my living room in Rhode Island. The prevailing tone of the conversation, as in almost any scholarly gathering, was critical of the United States. Yet the symposium itself replayed the script of international literary exchange that Engle, Nieh, Stegner, and their colleagues had drafted close to 70 years ago. Even in critiquing the creative-writing Cold Warriors, we were talking to each other because of them — from the mainland U.S., from the U.K., from Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Who else, that night, was doing such diplomacy? Surely not Mike Pompeo’s State Department.

The vibrancy of the symposium, the vitality of the new scholarship, not to mention the artistic fruits of the international-exchange programs under discussion, have raised for me questions that are almost too uncomfortable to ask: Was the mid-century idealism actually doomed from the beginning? Or were there good ideas in there?

Engle and Stegner were progressive New Dealers with a visceral but also considered hatred of Nazism and Stalinism. They felt horror at all forms of totalitarianism and political repressiveness; an animating aversion to racism; and a desire to see economic and social justice for the marginal and the oppressed. They engaged in the larger campaigns of what the scholar Greg Barnhisel has called “Cold War Modernism,” the recasting of a wide movement in the arts for narrow diplomatic purposes — narrow, but hardly jingoistic. Yet by the 1960s a new generation regarded men like Engle and Stegner as part of the problem, too cozy with channels of power that facilitated American imperialism. This criticism, of course, must be aired. These creative writers, like so many of their contemporaries, were burned around 1965 by their righteousness from 20 years earlier, as the Vietnam War gave the horrific lie to their good intentions. Even so, their careers weren’t tenures of ceaseless evil. They dealt in mimeographs, not napalm, and tried to use them for peace.

Their most unfortunate legacy, in my view, is not that they worked to put America in cultural conversation with the world. It’s that they succeeded at the expense of American culture (and, as Cruz has demonstrated, Filipino culture, too). They promised us — through the creative writers who taught the creative writers who taught us — that our own little stories are enough. They insisted that you and I do a kind of civic good by simply giving witness to our immediate experiences.

Hiroshima and Auschwitz gave this orientation overwhelming plausibility, for a time. Against vast forces of destruction — technological or systemic — so many lone, distinct, humanizing testimonials appeared to offer the most potent form of resistance. Since World War II, everything from Selma to Ferguson has kept such witness alive as a powerful outlet for important dissent — especially for voices scarcely represented in the early decades of institutionalized creative writing. But even in the age of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the results of making self-expression the ultimate form of political righteousness (not to mention of literary art) are, to say the least, mixed. Social media have metastasized this creed — which originates from many sources, not just creative-writing programs — to reveal its disastrous narcissism. (A whole presidency has now based itself on a grotesque preoccupation with a wronged self.) The problem with exporting literary smallness in 1950 (or 1960 or 1970 or 1980) was not the exportation. It was the smallness — the putative civic sufficiency of unapologetic selfhood.

That 1950s-style internationalism, under scrutiny at our Zoom symposium in May, suggests that there may well be specters more ominous than, say, soft diplomacy. There might be worse things than a State Department that stocks international reading rooms with books critical of the nation doing the stocking — which, as Barnhisel and diplomatic historians have reminded us, the United States did after World War II. The fruitful interrogation of tragic inheritances and imperfect visions could well be the only humane politics left for us to practice. It was what the most sophisticated of the cultural Cold Warriors were committed to and what I sensed in the air — or the pixels — of the Hong Kong event.

The day of the symposium, in streets almost within earshot of our conference hosts, clashes between protestors and surrogates from Beijing were reaching a violent pitch. Everyone on the call seemed to feel the Chinese Communist Party pressing at the border — even those of us far from Asia. Meanwhile, in the United States, powerful currents of illiberalism erode foundations that professors, until recently, have had the luxury of being so skeptical of. The months since November 2016 reveal that the only thing worse than too much credulousness about the possibility for reasoned cultural and political exchange — i.e., liberalism — might be its demise.

Eric Bennett is a professor of English at Providence College. He is the author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (University of Iowa Press, 2015).

To understand how power is wielded in America by wealthy politicians and their coteries of extremists in 2020, you have to consider the role of religion in our national life. An epic battle for the Bible is now underway in a country that has been largely ceded to white evangelical Christian nationalists. Through a well-funded network of churches and nonprofits, universities, and think tanks, and with direct lines to the nation’s highest political officials, they’ve had carte-blanche to set the terms of what passes for religious debate in this country and dictate what morality even means in our society.

Under Trump, such religious nationalism has reached a fever pitch as a reactionary movement that includes technocratic billionaires, televangelists, and armed militias has taken root with a simple enough message: God loves white Christian America, favors small government and big business, and rewards individualism and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the poor, people of color, and immigrants are blamed for society’s problems even as the rich get richer in what’s still the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176754/

Why Silicon Valley CEOs are such raging psychopaths

September 26, 2020 | 9:28am | Updated

This is enabled by an “infantilized culture” at many start-up companies, where employees become accustomed to working in “hyper-privileged bubbles where their every whim is catered to and every need anticipated,” she writes.

At Google, for instance, employees are treated to nap pods, free massages and a luxury hotel-style concierge service to run errands. The biotech firm Genentech reportedly offers perks like on-site car washes, haircuts, spa treatments and even a dentist.

“By sheltering these guys in this little cocoon or womb, it kind of emphasizes that young male problem, where Mom takes care of everything,” says Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and a veteran Valley-watcher. “It’s kind of magical, where food just appears, and ‘If my treat isn’t there it’s because Mom forgot to provide it!’ ”

[...]

Is Monthly Review the conspiratorial left? I thought MR was good.

It is good. Nothing Caitlin Johnstone ever wrote would appear in MR magazine. Nor would MR ever publish a book on Syria written by, for example, Stephen Gowans. It's just the zine that is probably in John Mage's bailiwick. There appears to be very little editorial control. When the Iranians wrote an open letter, nobody from MR even bothered to respond to it. For that matter, when they were boosting Qaddafi, a friend of mine from Uganda who barely escaped Idi Amin's killers, who were funded by Qaddafi, wrote a complaint to Foster. He didn't reply. I used to be fairly friendly with Foster 15 years ago but broke relations after Yoshie Furuhashi began posting shit that made Grayzone look good.

Since George Floyd was killed in May, foundations have committed $6 billion to "racial equity".

Yeah, but what does that have to do with the protests this summer over George Floyd's murder? It's a good idea not to be evasive when you are in a debate on Marxmail. I spoke about social media and you changed the subject. Tch-tch.