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9781421443560

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Worthwhile if you're a creative writer-or reader -Lit Hub Well researched, informative and...extremely interesting. -Times Literary Supplement

Worthwhile if you're a creative writer-or reader -Lit Hub Craft Class argues that the creative writing workshop, the primary classroom form that higher education uses to teach creative writing, has been understood too narrowly. Using an impressive archive, Kempf makes a substantial and crucial intervention to the history of the American arts and crafts tradition. -Juliana Spahr, Mills College, author of Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment Challenging conventional histories of arts and crafts ideology, Craft Class offers a provocative genealogy of the creative writing workshop. Creative writers, in addition to scholars of contemporary American literature, will find this well-written book appealing. -John Marsh, Pennsylvania State University, author of Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry Kempf performs a wonderful excavation of the meaning of the 'workshop' for the discipline of creative writing, demonstrating how it arose as a deeply human response to the problem of alienated labor in an industrial capitalist society. In a series of brilliantly chosen and illuminating case studies, he discloses the true historical significance of the craft ideal nurtured in such spaces, reawakening us to the utopian energies that circulate in the writing classroom even now. -Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing In Craft Class, Chris Kempf has woven a compelling history of how a range of writers in the early and mid-twentieth century-militant leftists, institutional liberals, disaffected radicals, and upwardly-mobile administrators-all drew upon of the idea of the artisanal 'workshop' to make sense of the great subsumption of craft labor under the discipline of modern capitalism. And he shows us the trouble this causes. To call writing labor, Kempf helps us see, is to enmesh the teaching and the practice of writing all the more fully in the contradictory character of labor itself. And he shows us how the contradiction built into the ideal of contemporary 'creative writing'-Write your truth! Defy normativity! Get a great job when you do!-has a long history. This is an indispensable book. -Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century

Worthwhile if you're a creative writer-or reader

Worthwhile if you're a creative writer-or reader * Lit Hub *

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Christopher Kempf is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at the University of Illinois. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Chicago, he is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost and Late in the Empire of Men.

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