How Iowa Flattened Literature (With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and ..

[jakeXT]

How Iowa Flattened Literature

With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction.

Did the CIA fund creative writing in America? The idea seems like the invention of a creative writer. Yet once upon a time (1967, to be exact), Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, received money from the Farfield Foundation to support international writing at the University of Iowa. The Farfield Foundation was not really a foundation; it was a CIA front that supported cultural operations, mostly in Europe, through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Seven years earlier, Engle had approached the Rockefeller Foundation with big fears and grand plans. "I trust you have seen the recent announcement that the Soviet Union is founding a University at Moscow for students coming from outside the country," he wrote. This could mean only that "thousands of young people of intelligence, many of whom could never get University training in their own countries, will receive education … along with the expected ideological indoctrination." Engle denounced rounding up students in "one easily supervised place" as a "typical Soviet tactic." He believed that the United States must "compete with that, hard and by long time planning"—by, well, rounding up foreign students in an easily supervised place called Iowa City. Through the University of Iowa, Engle received $10,000 to travel in Asia and Europe to recruit young writers—left-leaning intellectuals—to send to the United States on fellowship.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop emerged in the 1930s and powerfully influenced the creative-writing programs that followed. More than half of the second-wave programs, about 50 of which appeared by 1970, were founded by Iowa graduates. Third- and fourth- and fifth-wave programs, also Iowa scions, have kept coming ever since. So the conventional wisdom that Iowa kicked off the boom in M.F.A. programs is true enough.

But it’s also an accepted part of the story that creative-writing programs arose spontaneously: Creative writing was an idea whose time had come. Writers wanted jobs, and students wanted fun classes. In the 1960s, with Soviet satellites orbiting, American baby boomers matriculating, and federal dollars flooding into higher education, colleges and universities marveled at Iowa’s success and followed its lead. To judge by the bellwether, creative-writing programs worked. Iowa looked great: Famous writers taught there, graduated from there, gave readings there, and drank, philandered, and enriched themselves and others there.

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531/

[rafeh1]

1. one of Kurt Vonneguts

one of Kurt Vonneguts shorts stories was funded this way. It was about the Chinese red menace..

[cyberswede]

3. He lived here

...when he was in Iowa City.

[bemildred]

2. I've always wondered about that.

I don't entirely buy his thesis as cause and effect, but I've often wondered why academic creative literature was so focused on language rather than ideas. He provides an explanation.

I might also suggest an element of that being what they know, or have access to: observation, grammar and vocabulary, etc., unless they read widely in other disciplines. To write novels of ideas, you have to have ideas. I have often observed that writers of novels of ideas are not the best writers, and the best writers often do not write novels of ideas. Writers who combine the two are rarest of all.