78
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
78 points (100.0% liked)
art
22943 readers
39 users here now
A community for sharing and discussing art in general.
If you are unsure if a piece of media is on theme for this community, you can make a post asking if it fits. Discussion posts are encouraged, and particularly interesting topics will get pinned periodically.
No links to a store page or advertising. Links to bandcamps, soundclouds, playlists, etc are fine.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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