Forum / Milan Kundera, requiescat in pace

strannikov
Jul 12, 05:26pm

Among late twentieth century European novelists, the late Milan Kundera has remained about as notable for me for his essays on the tradition of the European novel as for his novels themselves (of which I’ve read only two: The Joke and the one more widely known to American readers The Unbearable Lightness of Being).

Kundera’s essays and commentary (including his glossary “Sixty-three Words”), collected in a French edition from Gallimard in 1986, were published in English translation (by Laura Asher) in 1988 in both Grove Press and Harper Perennial editions titled The Art of the Novel.

I read and re-read Kundera’s novels and essays and commentary in the late 1990s, when I still harbored thoughts or dreams of writing long-form fiction. Instead of taking up novels, though, and perhaps as a response to the impact of the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I took up screenwriting briefly. When that romance died the death after some two years of study and work, and as “life” intervened over the next five years or so, my ambitions for any kind of fiction writing went into self-imposed hibernation.

When I did finally emerge c. 2007, I had meditated on Kundera’s novels and essays long enough to decide (on the basis on watching American literary enterprise from the sidelines) that in fact I had no loyalty to the form of “the Great American Novel”, seeing what was becoming of it in the context of the academic captivity of American letters courtesy of all the colleges and universities competing with each other in hosting “writers’ conferences” and MFA credentialing programs.

Kundera, in European fashion, seemed always to acquit himself honorably as an intellectual (without all the advertised academic blandishments) with a mind engaged in exploring contents and reflecting upon issues that seemed no more than rare afterthoughts in the American novels I kept hearing about without ever reading. The European tradition of the novel, I had begun to decide, is well and good for the Europeans, since it is their literary heritage going back beyond Kundera’s Hermann Broch and Miguel Cervantes all the way to Rome’s Apuleius and Petronius (if not to Greece's Homer, depending on the utility or accuracy of genre distinctions). I had grown less convinced that the American novel was showing itself indebted to the European literary tradition, so I committed myself to emerging fashions of “micro-fiction” and “flash fiction”—with all the stupendous results that my readers can discern.

I cannot speak to prescience nearly as well as to coincidence, but it has happened that only two months ago I wrote an essay of my own, dealing with Kundera’s reflections on the European novel and some few of my own notions on the state of the American novel, that I’ve since sent out to editors (one European, one American) to await their verdicts. Permit me to quote my concluding paragraphs:

“Kundera ends his essay proclaiming his own (European) commitment to the novel as perhaps the sole literary force capable of disarming any threatening totalitarianism, with the novel’s intrinsic capacity for recognizing ‘complexity,’ for acknowledging ‘the elusiveness of truth,’ for championing ‘the spirit of continuity’ with writers of old who met the challenges of their times and who can never be judged the inferiors of any writer working in any contemporary era (no matter how ‘post-‘ an age or era it may be, even temporarily), for its habits of enjoining sublime ‘laughter’ at the pretences of ambitious totalitarians in order to undermine their ridiculous and humorless severity and to deny them the satisfaction of imposing severe obedience.

“If Kundera is right about the need for the novel in the European context for waging such wars, perhaps it would do for American novelists to work on American novels in their own context, but perhaps only as long as they work well outside the imposing institutional authoritarianism and enforced aesthetics of the MFA industrial complex. Perhaps, rather, the chief prose exemplar of American literary imagination remains the short story, as it has been for almost two centuries in spite of perhaps one or two American novels a decade acquiring or deserving broad American readership. Perhaps once writers of American fiction learn that MFA credentials far too often impair their vision and their expression according to the tastes and dictates of untethered and aloof American academics, American literary practitioners will find the strength necessary to challenge the semantic, axiological, and aesthetic totalitarianisms that already are choking both us and our waiting readers.”

While I remain curious to learn whether my essay will find an audience on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, hats off to the late Milan Kundera for his dedication and devotion to the cause of fiction and for its unique capacity to resonate with and to illustrate the lives we live apart from academic dogmatisms and in spite of the tech totalitarianisms now coming after writers and readers both with the advent of LLM and GPT robots.

David Ackley
Jul 13, 01:39pm

A well-deserved homage to Kundera, whose work will live on. Both "Unbearable Lightness..." and "The Joke," capture so well the stifling atmosphere of everyday life under a totalitarian regime that you find yourself taking shorter breaths while you're reading.

For a more comprehensive view of the alleged hegemony of what you call the "MFA industrial complex," I've read recommendations of Mark Mcgurl's, THE PROGRAM ERA about the postwar rise of the creative writing program in American universities. As the product, or in your view, perhaps the victim of one such program, I think the idea of the narrowness of such is overstated by both you and McGurl.

One might note that the great American short story writer, Flannery O'Conner was a graduate of tbe Iowa writers workshop. In my own case, my fellow participants and their products were notably diverse and few if any veered toward the ambition of the (white, patriarchical dominance perhaps) of the Maileresque "Great American Novel," including in subsequent productions, a pioneering work of Oral Nonfiction narrative, a seminal novel of gay feminism, and a prizewinning piece of very short fiction which these days would be called Flash.

I should note that another view might say that Kundera himself was part of the arguably more hegemonic category of Western (European and American) Literature, which both historically and in the present precludes consideration of works of a more properly world literature ranging from THE TALE of GENJI and "The Mahabharata" to the works of recent and contemporary African writers like Chinua Achebe and South American writers including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and of course, Borges, among many others.

But disagreements apart( or perhaps included) your views are welcome stimulations to thought and thanks for putting them here.

strannikov
Jul 13, 03:25pm

David: thank you for your gracious responses. My thoughts and their expressions do oscillate between "provocation" and "stimulation", as you say, but I cannot think I'm too keen to ignite fireworks, especially in an era already given to pyrotechnics.

Thanks for the reference to McGurl's work.

Whenever I cite Cousin Flannery's stint in Iowa, I often cite the five or six or eight relevant essays in her collection "Mystery and Manners" in which she encapsulates most of what she learned about craft from the Iowa program of its day (many a latter-day writer would agree: "you'd've had to've been there") as well as what insights she derived from her own working experience.

I am sure that many earnest writers (products and victims alike) of MFA programs have benefitted from their respective programs. My concern is not to persecute products or victims but to raise questions about the cumulative outcomes ("total effect", if we care to invoke Cousin Flannery again). I see next to no evidence that the proliferation of MFA programs has enhanced cumulatively the status, stature, or standing of literary enterprise in America over even the past half century (much less the most recent seven decades), certainly in no measure equal to the benefits accrued to the colleges and universities that operate such programs (the data are not easy to come by, but apparently a significant amount of US student debt has been amassed courtesy of MFA programs). I have begun to worry as much or more about what impacts MFA programs have had upon a generation or two of American editors as upon the publishing industry conceived as broadly as possible. (See Cousin Flannery's "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" for the basic arguments I accept and endorse.)

Lest anyone else (not you) misconstrue, I'm all happy and fine with baccalaureate English programs, though I would broaden their scope considerably (as I argue in yet another essay, which I also continue to hope is forthcoming from one outlet or another).

America's place historically and geographically as crossroads of cultures and their literatures is upon us now as it's been for some time. (As I know from provincial experience, though, crossroads can pose hazardous risks of collision.) Where we go from here is anyone's guess, and like you I would keep looking beyond the American historical literary tradition and the European tradition alike so as not to constrain visons of the possible--at some point I suspect we shall begin to realize that the global experience we share from hemisphere to hemisphere, century to century, millennium to millennium, exhibits degrees of recognition and familiarity, perhaps catching up finally to the meanings and intents embedded in so many ancient myths from around the planet.

Do stay well and keep up all good work, David, and thank you again.

strannikov
Jul 13, 06:24pm

Good substantive interview with McGurl from 2011:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGlyYESu6Oo

--in which one point he makes in closing is the relative dearth of American readers for American fiction. This, too, is tied inevitably to the practices and performance of contemporary American higher education, since it is post-secondary "schools of education" that credentialize and staff primary and secondary schools across the US: if writers have no better informed or more ready audiences for their works, we again have colleges and universities (and the institution of American public education that they staff and credential and for which they supply [sometimes too-fashionable] pedagogical theories) to thank and to blame.

(I cite here again hard-to-find figures, but: some 20% of American adults are said to be functionally illiterate [in English], another 10% of American adults are sub-literate [again, in English], and a further 10% exhibit literacy apparently only for practical and functional purposes, presumably not for reading fiction commonly. As disputed as these figures might be, they do tally with other figures suggesting that some 40% of college and university freshmen require one to two semesters/two to four quarters of remediation in English just to commence their undergraduate careers. [The last-cited figures do not seem to focus on foreign students arriving to study in US colleges and universities, since it seems that many or most of them acquired English fluency before getting to the US.])

We could also consider on some other day the way the American education establishment handles foreign language instruction: I assume it continues to postpone serious study to the secondary grades, instead of offering foreign language coursework in the primary grades.

Lots of work for us all! Let us keep busy.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Jul 13, 09:16pm

After spending many years in English classes both as a student and teacher I wanted to learn to write and I looked for a writing teacher, like you'd look for a ballet or violin teacher. It's that simple. The learning process is faster with good teachers. I'm not a victim of anything.

I could write more but I'm busy because there's been a flood here and maybe another one on the way. Later. :)

David Ackley
Jul 14, 03:18pm

Sorry about the flooding, Dianne, pretty brutal where you are, I expect/

Edward,

I've reread both your entries and tried hard to see what you're objecting to past the, to you, apparently malign, effects of the proliferated MFA programs in this country. My own view is that those effects, are at worst benign if not irrelevant to literary production, something that I believe is ungeneralizable and doesn't, being a uniquely individual matter, exist in any cumulative way except in the minds of literary historians( a strange breed in any event) looking backwards. Except as they lived at the same time any lumping together of say Hemingway and Faulkner would fail on matters of style alone.
As for now, who can say what strange and exotic flowers might be blooming in the crannies of the Iowa Workship or as far as that goes, in the neglected weedpatch of Fictionaut. Tune in fifty years hence.

strannikov
Jul 14, 05:37pm

Dianne: I hope y'all get relief from the plentiful rains and the perilous floods, but I saw from the satellite data yesterday that you were getting freshly soaked. Stay well.

As to the speed of learning: I agree, as long as the teacher is competent. Maupassant had the unrivalled good fortune to learn craft from a practitioner as accomplished as Gustave Flaubert, and he went on to show just how apt a pupil he had been and just how gifted a teacher Flaubert had been. At least two rare circumstances there.

On another hand: any immediacy with which I approached the craft of writing was derived largely and directly from my reading. (Apart from two undergrad semesters of freshman composition [time-marking prerequisites both], I took only two writing classes ever, one in my high school senior year [which entailed having to miss a third year of Spanish], the other as an undergrad elective.)

To both you and David and to anyone else: my objections to MFA programs are commensurate with anti-academician views alive and well in prior centuries, probably for a few of the same reasons. My assessments of contemporary circumstances may be in error, but I remain skeptical both of the institutional heft with which the commercial philanthropy is dispensed and of the nature of "mediated discourse"--as common to academic environments as to broadcasting--largely or wholly to the exclusion of "unmediated discourse" to be encountered out in the wilds of non-academic human experience (without failing to recognize, of course, that fiction constitutes its own domain of mediation and mediated discourse, but this itself is perhaps the central reason that I think the domain of fiction deserves and needs its own distinct environment, with its own rules of craft and assimilation thereto, to thrive in).

I worked in book publishing as editor and proofreader for over six years--not in fiction or in trade publishing, granted: but along with time served as a television news producer, I learned to see the heavy hand of institutional media at work 24/7/365 (366) and the intimate commercial connections between university writing programs and the publishing industry.

I continue to worry and wonder about the top-down and top-heavy impress of writing programs that funnel to eager publishers what eager publishers think the public wants or needs to read. Publishers, I know to the depths of my bones, have no better idea of what the public wants or needs to read than would or does any credentialed academic helping to steer aspiring writers into commercial molds of genre, content, style, et cetera. (We writers ourselves may have no better ideas, but at least we have the opportunity and the incentive to trust our own judgments and initiative when not being second-guessed and when not being trained to jump through academic or commercial hoops.)

It may do for me to concede that I am possessed of a sincere and visceral love/hate relationship with formal education, which has left me skeptical and critical of the numerous institutions governing American education, not because I've nourished resentments but because those resentments were deeply felt from my early years and have stayed with me, for reasons I need not belabor here.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Jul 14, 07:08pm

I took creative writing classes before people knew how to teach them. It was mostly a popular teacher holding court. But it's different now. I remember the first great exercises I saw were in one of Gardner's books I read in writing school. There's a gazillion books on writing now, many of them written by wonderful writers. I just read Abigail Thomas'. And MFA programs feed freshman comp faculties at colleges that are ecstatic if they can find an adjunct who owns a car. it's still the poet with the threadbare coat living in the attic. That's from Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Real Thing" I think it's called. Anyway, I forgot my point.

And yes, realism and minimalism helped to open the door not just at Iowa but everywhere for writers like me from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

And writers are readers too. There can never be too many of us. We had a major flood. Spread the word.

Chris Okum
Jul 15, 10:34pm

I will never understand people who slag off other people for wanting to go to school and learn how to do something. I have an MFA, and I was glad I got it. I also understand that to become a writer one must do two things at all times: read and write, and that no degree can confer upon you what hours of practice and dedication can. But this idea that MFAs are worthless smacks off the worst kind of elitism, the elitism of those who think they are above everything, including the act of being a student and learning from people who know what they're doing. What you're basically doing is calling teachers frauds, and I can't think of anything more conservative, right wing and reactionary than that. Despite your European nom de guerre you sound like an arch-American.

strannikov
Jul 16, 02:11am

Chris: Thank you for your response, in which you display some of your remarkable talent as a writer, talent I am sure you possessed both before beginning and upon concluding your MFA studies.

At the outset of your comments, though, you do seem clearly to imply that I am one of those “people who slag off other people for wanting to go to school and learn how to do something”. While I appreciate your contribution to the exchange in this text column, do you need to risk resorting to rude mischaracterizations of yours truly and indulging in the feeble or immature expediency of dismissing the explicit content of the somewhat detailed arguments I provided in the earlier posts with other glib (mis)characterizations? (After all: if in fact I were one of those “people who slag off other people for wanting to go to school and learn how to do something”, according to your own prefatory confession, I would be someone you can never claim to be able to understand, even if I have written and expressed my views as plainly as I have with whatever level of argument I offered.)

—yet: in spite of your own prefatory confession, you claim to understand me, since soon after you mischaracterize my arguments or misconstrue them either sincerely or disingenuously (I do not claim to understand you, even though I would never accuse you explicitly or by implication of slagging off other people for wanting to go to school and learn how to do something), you implicitly associate me with “the worst kind of elitism”, which you round off generously with the incendiary identifying tags (commonly found in American mediated discourse, I take pains to observe) “conservative, right wing and reactionary”.

Surely completing MFA studies could not have impaired your reading ability, but of course I do recognize that even the well-educated are not immune to lapses of misreading and misconstruing even plain text. An MFA graduate’s generous mischaracterization (however glibly styled) of what an MFA graduate purports to have read, however, would seem to involve a distinct exercise of volition. (Just curious, since I never enrolled in or completed MFA coursework: did your own program entail much or any discussion of intellectual honesty as a trait and a habit that writers of merit and distinction do well to cultivate?)

Do you think I have misunderstood or mischaracterized your comments?

Jeffrey S. Callico
Jul 16, 01:14pm

As has been exhibited in other forum posts I was part of, C.O. again comes off as nothing more than a bully. Don't let him intimidate you.

David Ackley
Jul 16, 03:28pm

I'm sure Edward meant nothing personal in his argument, but I think it comes from some unprovable initial premises: 1) that postwar European literature is superior to that of the US over the same period 2) that the US has produced no "Great," fiction since the war 3) that the proliferation of MFA programs over the last thirty or so years has somehow contributed to the aforementioned lack of "Great" fiction.

Besides the fact that we don't really know if no Great (by whatever standard) fiction has been produced, even if so, there is no provable connection between MFA programs and said lack. History is noticeably uninformative about its preconditions for the production of art. An argument has been made by some theorists (Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Jameson, Barthes)that the conditions of late-capitalism have trashed aesthetic standards derived from older historical situations, and left us with the need for new forms and new criteria to assess them. I can't help but think that an academic environment that brings together people who are approaching these problems from each of their different perspectives, confronting one another with their different voices, backgrounds, ideas and questions offers one fertile ground for inseminating the new and necessary.

David Ackley
Jul 16, 03:34pm

I should add that of course I'm biased by my own personal and favorable experience with one particular MFA program, without which I doubt I'd have continued writing. Which has at least benefited me, and my life, if no large group of readers.

strannikov
Jul 16, 07:53pm

David: thank you for your further substantive contributions to the discussion. The valid points 1), 2), and 3) that you raise I shall attempt to address without straying far afield.

1) I don't know that I can say, either, that European literature is "superior" to American literary output over the same era (I think I have only begun to claim that the wealth of the European literary tradition from Homer's day to ours is much, much richer than the cumulative treasures of the American tradition, derived in whatever measure from and/or illustrative to whatever extent of the European literary tradition it is descended from in no small measure). I do think we might be able to concede, though, that because of the inevitable proximities of the horrors and the destruction in Europe (versus the American experience), European writers were possessed of a greater intensity that the war imposed upon them. European writers of the post-War era were obliged to treat experiences and problems that I don't think were quite commensurate with the American experience of the war, given our relative geographic isolation and the events of Pearl Harbor notwithstanding.

2) Having alluded to my unfamiliarity with most post-war American literary work, I would specify that I've read very little over recent decades (I picked up Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski only in the past decade or so, but that was all late 20th century material, nothing more recent--I have Robert Hass's book on form but have not gone through the whole). Although much/most of my reading has been of Russian and French works in translation, over the most recent decade I've been diving as deeply as I could manage into both Japanese and Chinese literature (with lesser forays into Italian and Spanish works), which as you may imagine entailed dependence on both European and American scholarship, scholarship with its own illustrious history from Pound/Fenollosa and Waley to A. C. Graham and Burton Watson, et al. More recently still, I've begun to catch up with The Classical Tradition (Roman/Latin esp. but some Greek work inevitably, Homer's Iliad most notably). I have been attracted to these various non-American (and non-English) traditions because I'm persuaded they have already earned and already enjoy whatever posterity may endure. America, I have begun to fear, may still be suffering from the relative lack of its own tradition and exemplars of "the epic" with all the far-reaching resonances that epic works have wrought in both European and Asian contexts.

3) With thanks again for your patience with me, I am not out to persecute anyone who has completed MFA coursework and studies. My criticism(s) of the MFA I attempt to keep focused as a critique of the institutional apparatus. Like Dianne, I too am a former teacher, but frankly, I never thought myself a good teacher and never taught any two of my three+ years consecutively before leaving the classroom forever. I have spent enough time in classrooms as both student and teacher (and in one of my publishing gigs, in teacher-training materials) to wonder critically about the state of American education. To your citation of Benjamin, Adorno, Jameson, and Barthes, I would have to add questions of whether "late-stage capitalism" does not also and cannot but fail to have trashed pedagogical standards to at least an equal degree. Education is plugged into the US economy at every level from pre-K to post-doc, from government subsidization to commercial connectivity through sports and, yes, even to connections with publishing and media and, of late, tech. I cannot see that, among US institutions being questioned out loud, the American education establishment itself should for some arbitrary reasons be deemed off-limits to criticism and skeptical examination. (See again, too, my takeaway from the McGurl interview and his own assessment--already over a decade old--that the US education establishment has failed rather conspicuously to give aspiring Amercian writers the audiences properly equipped to consider or enjoy their [our] works. I think we can all be legitimately concerned that the views McGurl expressed in 2011 are virtually identical to views Robert Penn Warren expressed in 1984 in an address to the Academy of American Poets.)

eamon byrne
Jul 17, 02:17am

Well, a most interesting thread. I really have to comment.

Kundera is one I haven't read, but thanks to Edward's post I'll certainly rectify that in due course.

Most of us would have read widely in twentieth century fiction I'm sure. Like you, my own pets dominate the shelves of my bookcases, so I'll base my opinions on those. Henry James, Faulkner, Burroughs, McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann. And then Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Krasznahorkai, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Bernhard, Solzhenitsyn. I can't imagine many of that lot having attended a writing course at an educational institution. The thought of Kafka, whose last novel was entitled "America" , being enrolled in an American university writing course is quite bizarre in my mind. But then 'The Castle" is quite bizarre, so there you go.

You probably think I'm dissing, by inference, writing courses. Actually, I'm not. I'm simply saying that for the majority of the writers, whom by consensus would be considered major, writing courses and writing aids of all types are irrelevant. To the category of irrelevant writing aids I'd add the awful tools put in writing software to "assist" writers in plot and character management. My goodness, is a spell checker not enough?

Of course not. AI is here.

I went into 2 bookshops recently to buy a copy of anything by Martin Amis. He'd recently died. Nope. But there was a whole shelf in both shops full of James Patterson. Does this sad experience relate to anything said in this thread? I think so, but Ill leave it there.

Erika Byrne-Ludwig
Jul 17, 02:42am

I did a creative writing course at uni. The part I didn't like was that we had to be spontaneous. In other words, to write in 10 minutes about a topic given. I couldn't do that. I regretted having done this course. I could have learned another language instead and gained enormously from it. Anyway, everyone their own likes.

strannikov
Jul 17, 12:44pm

eamon and Erika: thank you for your contributions, each well stated as to need to elaboration from yours truly (except good wishes, eamon, in tracking down any work[s] by Martin Amis, I too heard only belatedly that he was a fine stylist--only lately, too, have I come across a reference to Style by Frank Lucas, whose works seem much better known in the UK than in the US).

David Ackley
Jul 17, 02:36pm

Edward:
Thank you for beginning this discussion and continuing it in good spirit, despite taking a few knocks and some disagreement along the way. It seems to me, aside from our own particular interests, to have opened some doors into questions about literary traditions: What are they? Do they exist? Any more? About the impact of this era( can we call it Late Capitalism, to borrow the term?) on Literary production in form, content, circulation(the market) and readership.
Some fertile possibilities here, which I hope we can continue...

I understand Chris's remarks above as being invoked by passion and an underlying, and I think quite justifiable, objection to the implicit elitist views that can thwart honest discussion, even when contained within more apparently "civil" rhetoric. They represent at heart other systems of dominance, and do deserve outing. Even if they were directed at something I said, I wouldn't take them personally, Edward.

When I get a chance, I'd like to say something about his work, which bears both on Fictionaut and some of these strands of this discussion that have evoked my attention also in something I've been reading... Later...

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Jul 17, 02:50pm

Any women writers considered major? Besides Flannery and some chick named Joyce?

strannikov
Jul 17, 03:43pm

Dianne: I think Mary Godwin Shelley remains underrated. Her Frankenstein might qualify as a vastly more incisive metaphor for the modern era than Husband Percy's "Prometheus Unbound", although I think her prose suffers from the dread influences of gothicism and romanticism (charges often levelled against Poe)--but then the latter especially was a compelling and almost irresistible intellectual fashion of that era to which many talents succumbed. (Next time I read it, I'll try to discern whether the Monster can stand in credibly as a metaphor for romanticism itself and how much it resonates with my growing comprehension of Technogenic Climate Change.)

David Ackley
Jul 17, 04:06pm

Just for a random and somewhat undereducated sampler, Dianne, how about Sappho, Lady Murasaki, Georges Eliot and Sand. Virginia Woolf among the moderns. Willa Cather of course. Katherine Ann Porter. If I had a better memory for names... but Anna Akhmatova springs to mind as well. Emily Dickinson, surely the best American 19th Century poet, and so far, maybe the best ever.

stephen hastings-king
Jul 17, 07:42pm

Kundera's discussion of kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being made a lasting impression on m---I wish it were less useful analytically/politically, but such is the world in which we live.

I've a copy of the film version of The Joke in one or another still-unpacked box (just moved house): I hadn't gotten around to watching it, but now look forward to it, thanks to this thread, once we find the box of course (it has to be somewhere, everything has to be somewhere).

But generally I was not moved by what I read of Kundera. I don't know why. Probably the timing. Maybe I should go back to it.

On MFA programs..
On the whole, they seem to me pretty obviously extractive, and there are so very very many of them but of that many so few that offer financial aid to students. That's a tell--same as with a lot of other terminal masters' programs.

But that doesn't mean the experience wll be one way or another--I have a lot of friends with MFAs and their post-masters experiences/attitudes have varied pretty widely---except for community---my friends all (or nearly) met other people & builtc communities via their programs, people who read/support/expand the horizons of each other and they're all pleased about that (even as access cost them about the price of a year's membership at a mid-level posh racket club). The expansion of terminal masters programs are a direct expression of the US higher ed on the human capital model, which has been a vastly more consequent disaster than that proliferation, and for vastly more people (education as credential-mill, MBA thot generalized, post-grad career advancement as ROI, blah blah blah). But I digress.

As for remarkable writers who are also women, Gertrude Stein is a long-time favorite, as is Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk is another, albeit less long-time b/c she's younger. Elena Ferrante is great too, I think. Clarice Lispector. I am a big Susan Howe fan, but there are lots and lots of other poets who are women and excellent writers as well (Lynn Heijinian comes to mind, Mei-Mei Bursenbrugge, lots of others but the afternoon 90 degree has weakened my recall)...

eamon byrne
Jul 18, 04:24am

Emily Bronte wrote a masterpiece 'Wuthering Heights'. It contains a remarkable passage utilising a rare, perhaps even unique, triple remove of narrative perspective - Lockwood relating Nellie relating Heathcliffe telling his story. The presence of the past is made felt so keenly, simply by having the past framed within a narrational present. The extent to which Emily Bronte utilises this technique is fairly extraordinary considering the era of its composition, particularly as it seems quite spontaneous on her part (unlike with similar examples of structural metatexts of a century later (for an example of which: John Barth's Chimera )).

David Ackley
Jul 18, 02:13pm

Eamon.

re: Emily Bronte's use of "triple remove," though much later and probably not derived occurs in Sebald's AUSTERLITZ. Maybe not ultimately unique but certainly a remarkable and interesting formal move on her part.

Dianne,

But I'm sure you have your own canon of authors: Care to share?

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Jul 18, 02:52pm

Major is a difficult category to figure out but to me Emily Bronte belongs there along with (in no particular order) Virginia Woolf, Katherine Ann Porter, Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Louise Gluck, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Annie Dillard, Tillie Olsen, Lydia Davis, Alice Walker. I recently read everything Abigail Thomas has published. I can think of others I've read and loved but they're not exactly major although I suppose every woman who gets something literary published should be on the list. Emily Bronte published WH as a man, right?

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Jul 18, 03:28pm

I didn't mean to leave out Flannery and the other Emily. They probably are the very best. Two women who pretty much stayed in the house, maybe had to stay in the house if I remember correctly.

Sam Rasnake
Jul 19, 01:01pm

"Any women writers considered major?" I'll add to... Elizabeth Bishop (my favorite poet), Natasha Trethewey, Jeanette Winterson, AS Byatt, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Carson, Agatha Christie, Amy Hempel, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Ursula Le Guin, Margret Atwood...

Granted, these are among my favorite authors - therefore, they are great.

David Ackley
Jul 19, 01:11pm

Alice Munro. Marina Tsvetaeva. Colette. de Sevigne.Kay Boyle.

strannikov
Jul 19, 02:24pm

Angela Carter, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Sayers, Gertrude Stein, Sigrid Undset (won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1928), and let us not forget Jane Collier (1715-1755).

I don't see that anyone has cited Sylvia Plath yet or Carson McCullers, either. (Perhaps no one wants to cite Margaret Mitchell or Ayn Rand.)

Sam Rasnake
Jul 19, 03:06pm

I should have listed Lucille Clifton - thought I did, but no.

Jeffrey S. Callico
Jul 19, 04:02pm

In addition to all women authors: Anne Sexton

David Ackley
Jul 19, 04:08pm

Well, and the criminally overlooked short story writer, Jean Stafford. Grace Paley. Iris Murdoch. Shirley Jackson, of course.

Chris Okum
Jul 19, 05:03pm

Grace Paley rules. She's a major inspiration. Her and Lydia Davis. I constantly re-read their work. They were both masters, a term not applied nearly enough to women artists.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
Jul 19, 05:18pm

Ruth Stone, Jayne Anne Phillips, Anne Tyler, Charlotte Mew, Joy Williams.
We're on a roll!

Erika Byrne-Ludwig
Jul 19, 06:47pm

Colette ...

strannikov
Jul 20, 12:43am

We can't forget Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), and we could remember the Welsh novelist and short story writer Kate Roberts while we're at it. I have Julia Peterkin on my shelf, too.

Chris Okum
Jul 20, 02:10am

I would also recommend Kate Zambreno as well. She is a younger-ish writer, but already a great one, using the essay form, as well as auto-fiction, in fresh and exciting ways. Her most recent book, on the French writer Herve Guibert, is wonderful.

David Ackley
Jul 20, 01:18pm

Karen Blixen provided a mantra to write by: "[To] write every day, without hope and without despair."

David Ackley
Jul 20, 01:27pm

I , shall we see, finessed, reading MIDDLEMARCH for a Victorian Lit class many years ago, its sheer mass, perspective, and suspected Victorian mores not enticing to my younger and lazier self.
Perhaps immaturity is not the best place from which to approach it anyway. Finally this past year I undertook it. First 50 oages not promising, but soldiered on since this is a frequent experience with novels until they begin to take you over. And so it went...

How could I have waited so long, against advice to the contrary, to experience what is quite likely the greatest of 19th century novels? Talk about your masters.

David Ackley
Jul 20, 01:30pm

Sorry, I meant to say greatest 19th century novel in English.

Darryl Price
Jul 20, 07:33pm

Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop, Ursula K. Le Guin, Emily Dickinson..

strannikov
Jul 21, 02:58am

With no thought of concluding the thread and the exchanges here but of continuing the discussion in the register Dianne supplied us with in noting women writers of note, an observation or two and/or a comment or two.

I think it both distinctly odd and perfectly natural that in our supplying the names of the women writers whose work we know, or perhaps sometimes only whose names we know well enough in order to cite (I still haven't found Angela Carter's works on US store shelves, nor Sigrid Undset's [though in fact for hers I have not looked]), it is possible for each of us to concede that we each failed to name significant women writers of merit and note. Granted, I think our Fictionaut focus was upon writers in English although there are some exceptions to be found in the census we contributed to in the paragraphs and lines above.

Still, I think we can concede and agree that we all missed some eligible names by referring to this list provided outside of our Fictionaut discussion:

https://www.readpoetry.com/female-poets-poetry/

This illustrates, as I said, a distinctly odd yet perfectly natural human trait: we are all constrained by the limitations of life and circumstance, intelligence and education, era and place, all these accidents of existence that limit each one of us, somehow, some way. (I don't know her work [yet], either, but I suspect more than one of us would like to have already cited Denise Levertov--perhaps I would've remembered to list her myself were her work included in any of the few poetry anthologies on my shelves. [Searching for her in indexes, I could not help but find the name Doris Lessing.])

Apart from the accidents of fashion and memory and acquired taste, the illustration of human limitation expresses why each writer's voice is important for someone to note. Some very few writers (from the oldest days only anonymous works) across our globe's histories of literature have managed to appeal to wide and vast swaths of humanity (and with available passage of time, to countless generations of posterity, out of dim and distant pasts, in spite of the growing or enduring unfamiliarity of former times and the strangeness of earlier circumstances). Many or most of the actual second-tier writers still appeal to vast audiences, but "prominence" (discounting its role in purveying mere fashion) is a notion that cannot have any facile democratic application: when prominence is accorded to far too many worthies, the concept ceases to have any substantive application at all. "Significance" itself does not enjoy much in the way of democratic sentiment, either, since contours of height and depth and texture in wielding words and language and palpable substance and perspicacity in content are qualities I think belong properly to those comparatively few first-tier writers in our literary histories, which we other mere mortals exemplify and participate in to whatever degree.

I now illustrate my own shortcomings. Until just before I began this entry, I had forgotten that lurking in a quiet spot on one of my dark shelves stands a book about both the author and her work, the Empress Eudocia, wife and consort of the Eastern emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century CE, who assembled her "Homeric Centos", an epic-style biblical poem relying on her adaptation of lines from both Iliad and Odyssey, for which she earned much notoriety and little contemporary appreciation or acclaim. (Scholars continue to assess the work, as do writers as recent as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and perhaps both John Milton and James Joyce.) I've started the book at least once (Chapter One, at least, has my own marginal notes and underlines) and intend one fine day to return to complete the reading. (Mea culpa: I am no disciplined reader or writer.)

The considerations foregoing I hope well illustrate our native and respective human embodiments of the idiosyncratic visions we each carry within us, unique to us, which we strive to write out of and are compelled to write with. These limitations do not make of us "half-people"--these limitations are intrinsic to the human condition we all share: and only as we share our limited perspectives with one another can we have any hope of fulfilling what the craft of writing calls us to or demands of us.

Chris Okum
Jul 21, 05:26am

Why would anyone want "to concede that we each failed to name significant women writers of merit and note" when all of us have clearly have done that very thing? This is the first thread of yours I've decided to participate in and it will be the last. You're an insufferable, pretentious pseud.

strannikov
Jul 21, 08:45am

If you say so, Chris, I won't contest it.

Jeffrey S. Callico
Jul 21, 12:37pm

Very good to know C.O. will no longer bully you, strannikov. Keep up the good work.

David Ackley
Jul 21, 01:31pm

Glad you mentioned Doris Lessing, Edward, whose name came to mind just this morning. What I think we are doing here is informally putting together an alternative canon which is almost necessarily a collective enterprise, since no one will have read everyone. Words of yours such as "first tier" writers are explicitly hierarchical and I think aren't quite in the spirit of what this has turned out to be. More interesting is the notion of indispensablity, where I think the names listed and those making their lists have surfaced writers who were important to them, perhaps indispenable. Canons like individual works are historical constructions, somewhat of their time. Anyway, I'd like to add Scheherazade,Simone de Beauvoir, and oh, fuck, I forget, but there was one other...

David Ackley
Jul 21, 01:33pm

Louise Gluck.

David Ackley
Jul 21, 02:19pm

Apologies,Dianne, I see you had already mentioned Louise Gluck. The one I had forgot was Gertrude Stein, whom many have seen as crucially important to Hemingway's style, particularly in his use of repetition, though she is clearly enough significant in her own right. But you'd included her earlier, Edward. As for the list you'd linked to indicate our alleged omissions, most of the prominent names( e.g. Ahkmatova) had already been mentioned here; the rest seemed, either, perhaps deservedly, obscure, or too current to deserve inclusion.

strannikov
Jul 21, 02:53pm

Thank you, David.

I'm sure that by "first-tier" I meant only those very select few who, even today, can commonly be cited as the standard-bearers of the language they employ (or who bear such serious consideration for nomination, no matter how contested).

Think Homer for the Greeks, think whom?--Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal for the Romans and their Latin? . . . like Kundera, think Cervantes for the Spanish. The French will be particular in choosing their own representative(s), but from the outside--Rabelais? Montaigne? Racine? Moliere? Germans seem much satisfied with Goethe. Modern Italians certainly have Dante as a poet, Machiavelli as a prose stylist (if they don't want to disown him), and Pirandello if they want to claim him. Shakespeare for English, I do not wholly dispute, as much credit as we may wish to accord Geoffrey Chaucer for helping to set things up, whereas Jonathan Swift endures as the language's greatest satirist. Russians commonly cite Pushkin before quickly splitting loyalties for either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Modern Irish may prefer Yeats or they may prefer Joyce. I'll leave my closer kin, the Welsh and the Scots, to speak for themselves, and I won't pull my Chinese and Japanese anthologies down at this moment.

Et cetera et cetera et cetera. "First-tier" writers are almost all earlier or much earlier writers whose output helped considerably to exhibit the native strengths of the language in their respective days and whose cumulative output helped shape the language in range and application across whatever centuries or millennia followed (since languages, like we, are prone to die).

In our brief moment we have no decent ideas of what awaits even our immediate posterity, much less those of distant centuries or millennia. Because our business is in "text"--or "texts" or, if someone prefers, "the text"--the recording and documentation of a text upon its composition is instantly as much and already as much of and as captive to "The Past" as any photograph or sound recording: this textual event has already irretrievably occurred, with its own fixative agents of editing, proofreading, and maybe typesetting.

I think on the basis of temporal realism we can agree that a lot of our work has already been done for us. (Some philosophers, maybe to their credit, still repeat the adage "all philosophy is a footnote to Plato".) Especially in our moment of global history, we cannot afford to discard our literary histories or the monuments thereof. We can coin as many canons as we wish in our moment, but surely our views will be assessed by later perspectives with differing views in order to reach their own consensus.

Even if the stuff of our business--language--in terms of literary monuments seems the least frozen in amber, I think rather we can regard the language in them as we think today of coelacanths, as "living fossils". Language stays alive only as long as we do (at least until further notice, the LLMs and chatbots might begin to disagree with us soon). I don't think any of us has any realistic idea that any canon can be imposed upon all by any one or by any group: whatever consensus can emerge will arrive only after all of our own fits and starts. --which sadly leads me back to my earlier skepticism regarding what I see as the dread influence of academic authority in American letters.

"Let writers write."

I must here shut my figurative mouth, since if I am persuaded that "writing teachers" perhaps should prefer writing to classroom instruction at academic removes, I want to come no closer to risking any lapse of my own into some derisory pedantic mode, which was a risk I took on, apparently, as soon as I invoked the memory of the late departed Milan Kundera. (Readers kindly disposed towards yours truly can regard me instead as an untalented or heedless or addled agent provocateur.)

David Ackley
Jul 21, 03:14pm

I think that your choices for the "first tier," even are both more contested, and more potentially crowded than you care to acknowledge, Edward. What no Sophocles, no Aristophanes among the Greeks? Where is Boccaccio, among the Italians? Or Gogol, and Chekhov, surely more canonical in the present, with the rise of the modern short story than either of the two giants? You avoid altogether--and advisedly--the minefield of the rise of the novel, particularly in 18th and 19th Century England, a contentious place, where Richardson, Sterne, Eliot and Dickens are still duking it out for the crown.
The truth is, even at the top, the canon is fluid and historically subject to revision, as we are presently doing. Oh, and by the way, we are not even sure there was a Homer, who may have been a collective of sorts, passing down the oral heritage of epic poetry, mouth to mouth, lost to our knowing in the misty and unknowable depths of our own literary heritage, from whomever we have all more or less evolved.

strannikov
Jul 21, 03:50pm

Some scholars even contend that there were two "Homers"--the Iliad Homer and the Odyssey Homer, however numerous the hands, however composite "the author" in assembling the received texts. Even though scholarship is now beyond the days of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, Carroll Moulton and William Scott, the oral tradition behind the Homeric epics seems now uncontested.

Yes, poor Sophocles, poor Aristophanes, poor Aeschylus, poor Pindar, poor Theophrastus, and poor Callimachus as well. Times and tastes somehow changed.

Boccaccio may have been a partisan of Dante enough to forgive my own omission. (waves to Giovanni)

Glad you mentioned Sterne in the context of the novel: absolutely no entry and no citation and no excerpt for Sterne appeared in the volume 1 of everyone's favorite Norton Anthology of English Literature in the edition of my baccalaureate days. Sterne was conspicuously absent, criminally absent if you ask me: my entire trajectory might have been different (maybe I would have found a greater taste for novels) had the editors and academics of the era seen fit to let Sterne even stand at a window, much less enter through a door. --but alas and alack . . . a stark failure of academic competence that I resent powerfully to this day. (waves to Laurence)

David Ackley
Jul 21, 04:38pm

I'm sorry, Edward, "Poor," Sophocles? In that you failed to admit him to your elect? This might be news to all who revere his work as the very embodiement of Greek Tragedy. News to Nietsche, surely. Chacun a son gout.

David Ackley
Jul 21, 04:45pm

Anyway, we've veered off what was, I thought, a very interesting way of cataloguing, from multiple personal perspectives, who should be included in a list of important writers and who have been more or less elbowed out from other lists,that seem topheavy with male writers.

Anyone we missed, anyone else?

eamon byrne
Jul 22, 10:23pm

Nathalie Sarraute. Important in the context of le nouveau roman. The Planatarium a very good novel.

David Ackley
Jul 23, 01:24pm

Althhough our list contains a number of living writers, one curious thing is the conspicuous absence of a few famous writers whose names would drip from most peoples' lips when asked a similar question. This suggests to me that the writers who are important to other writers are not the same as the ones known to the general public. Or maybe that the well known ones are not really all that important, by which I mean having no lasting effect on the minds of readers.
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