Reviews
Worthwhile if you're a creative writer—or reader
Well researched, informative and...extremely interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Play's a Thing: The 47 Workshop and the Crafting of Creative Writing
2. A Vast University of the Common People: Meridel Le Sueur and the 1930s Left
3. Significant Craft
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Play's a Thing: The 47 Workshop and the Crafting of Creative Writing
2. A Vast University of the Common People: Meridel Le Sueur and the 1930s Left
3. Significant Craft: Robert Duncan and the Black Mountain Craft Ideal
4. The Better Craftsmanship: Poetry Craft Books Then and Now
Coda. A Grindstone Does Its Job; Or, What about Iowa?
Notes
Bibliography
Index