In her 2010 review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Elif Batuman makes the following observation:
a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’).
Batuman here identifies an unfortunate contemporary trend, which hasn’t changed much in the eight years since she wrote her review: in our hyperspecialized era, we’re so eager to distinguish between those who study fiction and those who write it that we’ve created entirely separate curriculums for each—someone can get a PhD in English without reading anything after Flannery O’Connor, and someone can get an MFA in Creative Writing without reading anything before her.
The issue reemerged in January of this year when during an interview in Paris Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie dismissed a question about postcolonial theory by saying, “Postcolonial theory? I don’t know what it means. I think it is something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs.” Her comment was particularly surprising because her own novels engage with various postcolonial themes, including decolonization, assimilation, nationalism, and cultural hybridity, and universities often teach her as an example of contemporary postcolonial literature.
Adichie’s comment makes clear that one doesn’t need to concern themselves with literary theory to write powerful literature. But when authors completely reject the validity of entire theoretical fields, they inadvertently dismiss all the previous writers and thinkers whose work may have influenced their own, directly or indirectly. We may like to imagine that our work is universal, a depiction of human experience that transcends the literary categorizations of academics—but as various post-structuralist theorists have made clear, no human experience can ever truly be universal, and everyone’s lives, including the lives of novelists, are informed by a myriad of social, political, and historical forces that academics often group under labels like “postcolonial.” Thus, whether they admit so or not, all writers are part of broader literary movements.
As a result, studying literary theory can help fiction writers understand their own work’s place in the larger history of literature. Unfortunately, though, the current creative writing MFA curriculum presents fiction writing as separate from that kind of history—the standard MFA textbook, for example, Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, reduces fiction writing to various elements of craft (character, setting, plot, etc.) and presents these as universal rules rather than historically particular elements that have changed greatly over time. But what if, in addition to craft, an MFA textbook also discussed various literary movements such as Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism and also explored various theories of reading such as New Criticism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and Psychoanalysis?
The truth is, in separating themselves from literature and literary theory, fiction writers have inadvertently advanced one theory over others: the supposedly “universal” idea of liberal humanism, which, as Eric Bennett makes clear in his masterful book Workshops of Empire, is actually far from universal and was instead an ideological project pursued by Cold War American governments, which funded creative writing programs such as Iowa to combat communism. The idea that the human experience should be at the center of all fiction may sound to us like a universal value—but it’s really as historically specific as the idea that a novel should not be political or that one should always write in the past tense or the third person. By breaking free of such constraining “universals,” we as fiction writers can create literature that’s more experimental and subversive and that better reflects and comments on our world. Studying literary theory can help us do this.