Description
Book SynopsisThe hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term workshop for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model. In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industr
Trade ReviewWorthwhile if you're a creative writer—or reader
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Lit HubWell researched, informative and...extremely interesting.
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Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Play's a Thing: The 47 Workshop and the Crafting of Creative Writing
2. A Vast University of the Common People: Meridel Le Sueur and the 1930s Left
3. Significant Craft: Robert Duncan and the Black Mountain Craft Ideal
4. The Better Craftsmanship: Poetry Craft Books Then and Now
Coda. A Grindstone Does Its Job; Or, What about Iowa?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
