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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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yeah sure sure, but you see this above is a much more general and nebulous claim than
This is just vulgar Marxism
Remember that Marx admired Balzac...
Funnily enough between my first comment and this one, I was reading a book, and this page specifically, funny coincidence:
I like Raymond Williams more than the structuralists, but he's no vulgar Marxist either.
i agree with you if we are assessing the writing produced by the workshop model, but the critique here is how and why mfa programs were created, not necessarily how successful these programs were (or are) at producing the work their originators believed important. and forgive me, i'm mostly cribbing from workshops of empire, which lays out a pretty convincing case (with documentation to back it up) on which styles and aesthetics universities were to encourage (by way of syllabi, readings, students, etc.) and which were sidelined.
The first comment was explicitly about "aesthetic priorities" btw, so this is taking a turn, but we are converging
Yeah workshops of empire is pretty convincing provided you don't think about it too much. I think our main disagreement is the claims of this book.
If we overemphasise grants instead of the artworks, then we don't really need hermeneutics and criticism, only bookkeeping and financial statements...
Overemphasising syllabi versus the actual artistic production of the teachers and the alumni is similarly misguided. Purpose of the system is what it does..did Iowa churn out vacuous "realism" promoting wide-eyed liberal humanism?
Yeah the grants themselves might have been pointed, but Iowa teachers and alumni don’t fit that simplification. The people who were leading the program like Engle and Cassil, might have been opportunistic in applying for all kinds of grants, but their aesthetic was a kind of Flaubertian Chekhovian realism, which was already dominant among highbrow literary types all around the west, even the Eastern bloc. Now you can say that's bourgeois, but then you also think about teachers and alumni, especially the actual novels produced, say between 1960 and 1980 and then it will be obvious that it's an oversimplification
When someone writes a book like Workshops of Empire they need to make the case as forceful and pointed as possible (for a variety of reasons), but the result is often flattens the landscape. But completely agree that institution like MFA programs need proper historical materialist evaluation.
Workshops of Empire is interesting just don't take it too seriously, it's one of those books that will be an interesting footnote in a literary history 30-40 years from now