Did Conservatives Start Creative Writing Programs to Fight the Cold War?

By Published on November 22, 2015

In 1946, there were only two programs in creative writing at American universities — one at Iowa and another at Stanford. In 1967, when the Associated Writing Programs (now Association of Writers and Writing Programs) was founded, there were 13. A mere eight years later, there were 55, which nearly tripled by 1985, when there were 150 graduate programs and 10 undergraduate ones. In 2012, there were 342 graduate programs in creative writing, from the M.A. to the Ph.D, and 163 undergraduate ones.

How did this happen? Why were creative writing programs started in the first place, and how did they become so popular?

In his fashionably titled Workshops of Empire, Eric Bennett argues we can thank Cold War conservatives and liberal allies. According to Bennett, during the Second World War, a group of loosely associated writers and critics came to believe that teaching fiction and poetry to American (and, eventually, international) students could inoculate them against communist propaganda. Indebted to both New Humanism and New Criticism, writers such as Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner founded creative writing programs that taught students that literature was essentially “individualistic” — that is, it affirmed the reality (and perhaps primacy) of the human will and individual actions — and that it valued messy particulars over neat abstractions.

Read the article “Did Conservatives Start Creative Writing Programs to Fight the Cold War?” on freebeacon.com.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Like the article? Share it with your friends! And use our social media pages to join or start the conversation! Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MeWe and Gab.

Inspiration
The Scarcity Mindset
Robert Morris
More from The Stream
Connect with Us