Comments on: A Note on MFA Programs

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:27:45 +0000

Cf. the entries on “Subconscious” & “Unconscious” in Laplanche & Pontalis’s great Language of Psychoanalysis, which explains why to speak of the former, especially in a psychoanalytic connection, is imprecise.

By: Doodle

Doodle — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:53:54 +0000

I cannot understand the fuss over PhDs, MFAs, and Garrison Keillor. What do these things have to do at all with poetry?
(You don’t need an advanced degree to notice that Lydia’s name owes a little something to Marx – Groucho Marx, that is; here’s a link to her website: http://www.lydiaolydia.com/)

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 04:19:33 +0000

How do you know he meant unconscious? I don’t get what the difference is anyway.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:01:26 +0000

Lydia: I meant subconscious. I also incorrectly spelled “alternative,” would you like to take that one, too? But in all seriousness (I am being stupidly snarky), and to address something I didn’t, to not have “love of literature,” to not even have that factor into graduate study, seems to be the greatest tragedy. If it doesn’t exist as a motivation and a continuation of the study–if it gets squeezed out of us, that raw joy and je ne sais quoi of reading just for reading’s sake–I shutter to think what we’re doing to our culture, and to book sales. And to what we’re teaching our students, the future readers of America and lover’s of raw life. If I ever read and think about hegemony or postmodern discourse or Jungian that instead of (or not even in conjunction with) the visceral pleasure of language, may I die right there and then. What I’m saying is that theory isn’t bad, heck no, I’m saying that specialized theoretical language is polluting creative writing as writing (not the ideas, the WRITING)–especially as creative writing becomes more and more absorbed into the academy. I don’t believe there’s anything absurd about that.

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:57:06 +0000

Seconded! Lydia! In all respects!

By: Lydia Olidea

Lydia Olidea — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:09:30 +0000

Sheesh, Benjamin, I certainly agree that no one should waste their time in a PhD program if they’re going to be taught to say “subconscious” when they mean “unconscious.”
As for the rest, isn’t a good measure of the value of PhD programs not some absurd idea of what their spiritual relation to the idea of literature or art is (I mean really), but whether they, you know, seem to lead to good ideas? Just as one might measure MFA programs by whether they are able to aid in the production of poems we like?
Here are some thinkers who I have found extraordinarily useful in my own writing (sometiems via disagreement): Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Susan Stewart, David Harvey, Franco Moretti, Yunte Huang. Do these people have PhDs (or equivalent)? Yup. There are also writers without PhDs who have helped my thinking. But the idea that “love of literature” is even vaguely a meaningful measure is mere travesty.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:20:09 +0000

I’ve nothing well-written to add (what a preface to my comment). I’ve got one year left of my six as a Ph.D. student, and the ONLY REASON I’m doing it is because I love writing, am decent at it, wanted the time to study and explore literature, all while NOT being given an early death with a soul-numbing 9-5 job. I know I’m rare in this pursuit of 9 years (MFA and PhD) of grad study. And grading papers all the time really cheeses me, detracts from my writing time and intensity, though I see no feasible alterntive if I want to practice my craft as a young writer. And if I stay away from the comp and rhetoric folks, and the heavy theory folks in other sub fields, I’m ok, I can keep my creative / writerly bliss around me fairly well, teaching or not. Theory is helpful as long as one doesn’t get lost in it, or, let it replace the raw energy of creativity (access to the subconscious, the divine, the muse, the deeper self, a zen state, whatever). I see too many peers lose their creativity for a love of all things theory, and I hate talking to them because they are no longer real, no longer in the real world, and I feel their writing will never connect to anyone but themselves and the academy. An old argument / story I suppose, though. Always enjoy your entries, Reginald.

By: unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:35:54 +0000

I seem to have a knack for posting to doornail-dead threads, but here’s this anyway: from an AWP Jobs List article by Diana Hume George, “How to Survive on the Tenure Track” (March/April 2000).

If you wanted writing time, you should have gone into any field except English, and within English, any specialty except teaching writing. Academe can be a good gig with plenty of flexibility and security, but our job in English, and especially in writing, takes longer than anyone else’s. When the annual load is six to eight courses, more than half will usually be composition in the pre-tenure years; and if your specialty is writing instead of literature, then your plums, those two courses you get to teach in your specialty, are more writing courses, with more papers to grade. What were we thinking? It may be too late for you, but if some of your best students are writers with a strong interest in another field, tell them to think about it. Academics in math and psychology and art history and business don’t have a backlog of student papers to edit every moment of their waking lives. If I had to do it all over again, I might have become an anthropologist. Everything is fuel for the writing life.

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:05:28 +0000

I’d like to make it clear that I love teaching and hold it in the highest regard. There’s nothing in what I wrote that would even remotely imply a disparagement of teaching. I simply noted that a PhD is a necessary but not a sufficient credential for getting a tenure-track academic position–increasingly so even in creative writing, as Rich Villar notes–and that acquiring that professional credential is the reason that most people pursue and complete PhDs. For the most part, people get PhDs because they want jobs in academia. Hardly an incendiary observation.
I might also point out that good teaching is in practice not necessarily the primary criterion in academic hiring and retention. I don’t endorse this situation, I simply note it.

By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:51:27 +0000

No, Mr. Shepherd, I think it’s good you left the stuff about the Ph.D.’s in the post.
For those of us clamoring within the MFA system, the next logical point is, has the MFA gone from terminal degree to steppingstone to Ph.D.? We are learning quickly, as you’ve pointed out, that an MFA and even multiple book credits do not guarantee you a place within academia. So some of us will go even further into debt to acquire the “big” credential. And for what? If the goal is to find the time to write and publish books without starving to death, then given the lack of jobs, it might be a better idea to take the money one might spend and sink it all into lottery tickets.
I admire your skill in finding a program that paid your way somewhat and allowed you time to write. I’d be interested to see the numbers of how many writers in MFA programs DON’T get those benefits.