I am dubious about his idea of the ‘harm’ the Workshop has done to writing. Bennett’s career as a novelist may have been deferred, but there’s no doubt he can spin a ripping yarn. Lest anyone think that the University of Iowa is a bad sport about Bennett’s criticism, the University of Iowa Press is publishing his Workshops of Empire, which goes into depth about the relationship between the Cold War politics and writing programs. My only criticism of Bennett is that he could have spent less time taking the piss out of the éminences grises of Iowa writing programs and more time fleshing out the changes he would like to see, using a more positive tone. His words crystallize the main criticism of the workshop-ization of literature, that workshops have homogenized writing and discouraged innovation. He snipes at Iowa City literary lions in a way heard only sotto voce in Iowa City, after too many Maker’s Marks at George’s. This might sound like a put-down of Bennett, which I don’t intend - I loved this essay. It has a peculiarly rarefied sort of lit-crit bitchiness to it - a particularly refined vintage of sour grapes. The subtitle of the piece sums it up: “With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. He wishes to link Engle’s scandalous flirtation with mid-century American neo-liberalism to a more pervasive problem he perceives with writing workshops in general and the Iowa program in particular: that workshops promote a particular type of writing, and worse, that they discourage other, equally worthwhile literary ambitions. ![]() How Engle’s politics affected Iowa’s writing programs, Bennett leaves mostly as an exercise for the reader. This, along with Engle’s successful fund-raising amongst wealthy, conservative businessmen, is offered as proof of Engle’s ideological conservatism. Although it is better researched and more erudite than Stephen Bloom’s 2011 critique of Iowa published in The Atlantic, Bennett tilts at the twin windmills of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and International Writing Program in a way that has no doubt ruffled some feathers-to mix a metaphor.īennett, a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop, brings up two different topics in this essay: First, he summarizes his research on the founder of both the IWP and Writers’ Workshop, Paul Engle, which reveals that in 1967, Engle solicited a CIA front organization for money. 10, The Chronicle of Higher Education published Eric Bennett’s essay, How Iowa Flattened Literature. Government entities have unduly influenced the Workshop’s voice, Bennett argues.
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