Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Nadiminti, Kalyan

Titel

The Global Program Era: Contemporary International Fiction in the American Creative Economy

Ist Teil von

• Novel : a forum on fiction, 2018-11, Vol.51 (3), p.375-398

Ort / Verlag

Providence: Duke University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• “The Global Program Era” traces the rise of the international writer from the global South in the North American master of fine arts (MFA) program and the resulting effects on the contemporary global anglophone novel. Extrapolating from Mark McGurl's (2009), I suggest that the creative writing program not only was instrumental in shaping postwar American letters but also continues to be of great relevance for contemporary global South writing. The article argues that developing-world MFA novelists have redeployed a Cold War programmatic imperative to “find your voice” through the stylistic development of what I am calling “vernacular anglophone realism.” The turn to the non-anglophone vernacular continues the postwar tradition of ethnic ventriloquism for a mainly bourgeois Western audience but also supplements a new non-Western, middle-class audience. Vernacular anglophone realism cultivates a sense of natality losing the author's linguistic and geopolitical security in the English language, therefore allowing the global South writer to address both Western and non-Western audiences. While this might seem like a welcome development—one that refines an Orientalist market logic diagnosed by Graham Huggan as “the postcolonial exotic”—the article argues that MFA programs have encouraged a style of writing that centralizes the primacy of a global bourgeois/middle-class reader. Subsequently, the global South writer has become firmly ensconced in a financialized American creative market. While global anglophone literature has emerged as a critical reference for persistent injury by British colonialism, the article shifts the conversation to the cultural development of the American anglophone novel to query whether turning to the vernacular evades the problem of U.S. exceptionalism.