How the Literary Class System is Impoverishing Literature
February 10, 2016 9:25 AM   Subscribe

One of the most compelling arguments for literary diversity has to do with the people who are following behind. If a little Mexican-American girl grows up with dreams of being a poet, what happens when she looks at the prize winners each year and doesn’t see anyone who looks like her? Can a young African-American man aspire to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist if he doesn’t know that there is someone like him out there? I would argue the same thing happens for working-class kids, especially those in families more concerned with putting food on the table than getting to the symphony, families who see the arts as the sole pursuit of the rich (as my own working-class immigrant father did).
posted by Kitteh (12 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
She shouldn't, really, be encouraging her students to go into publishing. As an industry, it's in a slow death spiral. If they want to make sure they're going to be able to eat and have a roof over their heads, if they want to be able to have kids and buy a roof to put over their heads, it's a bad move. There are a shit ton of other choices that will be much safer.

Maybe this sounds like some ironic preamble where I'm now going to extol the virtue of pursuing your dreams against the odds. It's not. I think there's a strong chance the global economy is going to get more volatile and stratified in the coming centuries. The ability to pursue your dreams is a luxury, especially when that dream is a dream of glory shared, with equal ardency, by millions.

Arts wise in general, we seem to be headed back to pure patronage. In some lucky cases, like Michaelangelo meeting the Medici, the poor but talented will encounter a well of support that will sustain them. Else wise, it's the case of the desert blooms. More sand, less scent.
posted by Diablevert at 9:43 AM on February 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


"If you were to take a worker gifted with a creative imagination and ask him to set down his experience honestly, it would be an experience so remote from that of the bourgeois that the Man in White[*] would, as usual, raise the cry of "propaganda." Yet the worker's life revolves precisely around those experiences which are alien to the bourgeois aesthete, who loathes them, who cannot believe they are experiences at all. To the Man in White it seems that only a decree from Moscow could force people to write about factories, strikes, political discussions. He knows that only force would compel him to write about such things; he would never do it of his own free will, since the themes of proletarian literature are outside his own life. But the worker writes about the very experiences which the bourgeois labels "propaganda," those experiences which reveal the exploitation upon which the prevailing society is based."
—Joseph Freeman, Proletarian Literature in the United States.

*Probably not Tom Wolfe.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:59 AM on February 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


So she has made an excellent case for how a 'career' in publishing for almost all who attempt it, and even most who succeed at it, really is just an hobby for those with more money than sense. What I don't get is how, whether her students have more money or less sense as she prefers, why she thinks continuing to train them will have some kind of productive effect? Inevitably, the most important thing they will do as voluntarily exploited workers will accomplish for the the exercise of professional creative writing will be to push it yet further towards being dominated exclusively by those able to bear the exploitation, as well as those who really aren't, rather than those with genuine merit - pushing us further towards a mix of bourgeois hobbyists and pitiable masochists rather than good writers who can authentically speak to us.

Her students only really have the power inherent in what they are willing to consent to, and that power can be considerable, why dilute it by pumping out more?
posted by Blasdelb at 10:10 AM on February 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Arts wise in general, we seem to be headed back to pure patronage.

These days there are a lot of new avenues offering a lot of money for success for art that resonates with many people (and a lot of nothing for art that fails to get noticed amidst the clamor.) For art intended for niche audiences, well that has always been the realm of privilege or patronage, exceptions being aberrations rather than norms.

Part of the issue also seems to be a mirage created by a disconnect between new and traditional arts establishments, ie The first great works of digital literature are already being written
posted by anonymisc at 10:42 AM on February 10, 2016


This really resonates, as someone who grew up kind of on the edge of working class (my parents were, for much of my young life). And wanting to go to art school, and having literally no guidance or any idea how a professional artist life would look. Even my teachers weren't much help (preparing a portfolio for college?!) My parents (not unsupportingly!) thought drawing was a great gateway to a career as a caricature artist, and now that I'm a photographer they're relieved I sometimes shoot weddings, because that's the work they have a reference for.

My cousin working on her PhD in lit gets a lot of hassle from the family, and her MFA was FUNDED. Talk about living the dream. And again, while not necessarily unsupportive, there's just not much support they can give, because it's not a life they have any experience with.

And I had to work to support myself through a BFA at a state school, and now I'm in my early 30's trying to decide if I should finally go for that MFA or if, actually, what I really should do is take a couple of years off full-time work and build a career for myself, because all I really want is that couple of years to do nothing but work on MY WORK, and I can do it myself for a lot less than tuition.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 10:51 AM on February 10, 2016


One of the panelists, an editor, offered that the first thing he looked for when skimming through the cover letter was whether the writer possessed an MFA.

I was hoping he was going to follow that up by saying that those were the ones he discounted; rather like the hard-boiled newspaper editors of old who were happier with would be cub reporters who had not taken journalism classes because now there was less to un-teach them. I would think you would, accordingly, find more sheer originality in aspiring writers who have not gone the academic route. And while we are suitably glutted with the (presumably steady selling) same old same old, it's frequently the totally left field books that, for reasons know but to God, resonate with the largest audiences.
posted by BWA at 10:56 AM on February 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


She's not talking about giving the students a chance to pursue their dreams. She's talking about giving the rest of us a chance to benefit from a literature that is shaped by people who reflect our society.

I've been going around and around in my head lately on finding some way to reach out to the ethnic studies department at my alma mater and have them send us some potential internship candidates. Publishing is brutal, no doubt, and I don't want to harm these kids, but internships at my company pay the same as the retail job I had in college (per hour, more if you factor in the steady schedule). And we - my company, for sure, but also the reading public - need these students who have studied the literatures of Asian America and black America and learned to think critically about race and representation in pop culture, we need their voices, we need to shape them into editors who will change the demographic makeup of our editorial department. I think this month I will try a little harder to make that happen.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:58 AM on February 10, 2016 [8 favorites]


My response to this is "yes...and?" Did we not already know these things?

Perhaps it's too personal. I was great at my job editing in NY, but I couldn't survive there on what they could pay me, so I left. Because editing largely remains a job for those with well-off spouses or who don't need to work because they have family money. A hobby job, kept that way because there are lots of people who want to do it and more importantly, rich people like doing it or having their kids do it. The fact that poor kids are kept out of the competition is a feature, not a bug, for them.

Add massive publisher consolidation/layoffs to the mix, in journalism as well, and you get a lot of people like me, struggling to find other things to do that use our skills but pay us a living wage.

As for becoming a famous writer, it's no different from breaking into music or movies; the clearest path to success is for those who are related to others who've already been successful. If your dad was a famous author/actor/musician, or friends with one, or has lots of money to promote you, you have a better shot. Some talent and skill is necessary, but not as important as people want you to believe.

I seldom read the critically acclaimed novels because I got tired of reading the anguished stories of characters, who, like their authors, went to prep schools and Ivy Leagues and had hobby jobs and family money and being told "this gets at the heart of the universal human experience."

Not my experience, buddy.
posted by emjaybee at 10:59 AM on February 10, 2016 [12 favorites]


This essay is timely to me. Just yesterday I was reading about a new STEM school opening in our area, and grumpily thinking about all the adulation poured on those schools because they'll offer large, diverse groups of kids better opportunities in science fields...but no other fields. There just doesn't seem to be any effort to open similarly shiny-optimistic schools for the humanities; if anything, we seem locked into this idea that the arts are dead, that nobody will ever pay for the arts ever again, all is lost (even while re-upping our amazon primes and netflices and downloading thousands of books to our ereaders).

This idea that there is only one city in the entire nation in which one may learn to write and publish, is pure classist poison. Everything about our approach to getting literature written and printed on the page is poison. We publish hundreds of thousands of new books a year; there is plenty of room and money for democratizing that, and for funding working-class and poor students as they learn to write and edit, where they live.
posted by mittens at 11:01 AM on February 10, 2016 [9 favorites]


It can work the other way, too.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:52 AM on February 10, 2016


Are there any arguments against literary diversity?
posted by OHenryPacey at 1:58 PM on February 10, 2016


The internship system in general troubles me. It's a wonderful way to make sure that incoming talent is either well-connected or absolutely zealous. I find the trend towards extensive internships in all industries worrying and problematic.
posted by frumiousb at 3:58 PM on February 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


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