Can or should creative writing be taught?

[alice wellintown]

Right now, the questions we are asking are, why can't people read and
write well? How do we teach students to write well? How do we teach
students to read difficult texts?

I like Menand’s work. His Metaphysical Club, recommended by someone on
this List (MalignD?) is a book I also recommend to P-listers.  There
are only a few academic articles that discuss the American
philosophical strain that informs Pynchon’s works. I mean Pragmatism.
But they are buried under the stacks that claim or assume Pynchon’s
philosophical influences are Eastern, Transcendental, or not
philosophical but Theosophical.

I took a Writing Poetry course at the University of Iowa. It was just
as Menand describes it: a process shepherded by a published poet who
didn’t know the first thing about teaching anybody anything.  I was
the best poet in the class.  And I’m no poet.

I hope that Menand’s article is not an augur of another academic
apogee (see, I told you, I’m no poet).

Has the pendulum gathered enough potential energy to reverse
directions? I don’t know if the pendulum is peeking, but the process
he describes is still around. The guru has no body of knowledge to
transmit, no curricular script, no curriculum exists. Creative writing
is an odd sect of that discipline that lacks it, English, the
redheaded step child under the stairs in the falling house of the
Humanities. There, where slick posters of Shakespeare and Toni
Morrison, cool comics trashing both Bush Wars, mantra such as “to
thine own self be true” and other cant truisms billboard the corridors
and offices. Professors and graduate students usher young students who
have often failed at disciplined majors like Science to a seat in
front of a PC where they post and blog and chat with other chronically
underemployed and over educated.

It’s a pyramid scheme. Blind mouths! that have been shepherded into
the flock of failure by teachers who speak in platitudes and, as the
cliché sez,   “live vicariously.”  Pity the foolish parents who
mortgage their homes to keep a daughter at Reed College studying
abstract expressionism and finding herself. Having done so, I take
some solace in the fact that my daughter, though still searching for
herself at experimental farming after giving up on painting after
meeting a very cool tattooed graduate student on one of her trips to
Africa,  did get an excellent education. Reed has a curriculum that
other schools should take a hard look at. But most humanities programs
need to sell themselves and can't justify their budgets. Why do we
need someone who teaches Queer Theory or Milton? And, why don't the
English Departments teach students to write? Creatively, persuasively,
whatever.

If I have one criticism of Menand it's that he name drops too much. I
happen to know all the names he dropped and I have copies of their
books, but I don't expect most readers know half of what he's alluding
to.

That said, I hope people will go on teaching writing. Teach people to
write poems, letters, essays, editorials. Teach them to read, comics,
billboards, Cassill's Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. It's the
democratic thing to do. God knows we need to do everything we can to
get out democracy back in the hands of citizens who read and write
well.

As Walt Whitman sez, Give them Books, Open the Libraries!
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00159.html