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Creative Writing Programs, Literary Markets, and the Short Story Renaissance

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Creative Writing Programs, Literary Markets, and the Short Story Renaissance DISCIPLINE AND PUBLISH: CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAMS, LITERARY MARKETS, AND THE SHORT STORY RENAISSANCE by ROBERT WELLING ADDINGTON Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Gary Stonum Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY August 2013 2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of ________Robert Welling Addington_________________ candidate for the __PhD_______________degree*. (signed) _____Gary Stonum________________________ (chair of the committee) ___________Michael Clune_______________________ ___________Chris Flint ________________________ ___________ Molly Berger______________________ _____________________________________________ ______________________________________________ (date) ___3 May 2013________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. ! ! ! 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. 4 Abstract ............................................................................................. 6 Introduction ............................................................................................. 8 Chapter One The Stories of John Cheever .............................................. 43 Chapter Two The Editing of Gordon Lish .............................................. 75 Chapter Three The Self of Lorrie Moore ............................................... 113 Chapter Four The Career of Lee Abbott ................................................ 150 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 185 Notes ......................................................................................... 194 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 199 4 Acknowledgements Thanks first to my dissertation committee, Chris Flint, Michael Clune, and Molly Berger, who have challenged me, frustrated me, and supported me throughout this project. The dissertation is the better for it. An incalculable thanks goes to my advisor, Gary Stonum. Eight years ago, Gary saw something in the wide-eyed, newly arrived graduate student enrolled in his Critical Theory course and took the kid under his wing. That student, now much less wide in the eyes if much more gray in the hair, feels incredibly fortunate to have had Gary’s guidance through the years. His generosity and, especially, his patience have been remarkable. I’d also like to thank all the professors in Case Western’s Department of English, and in particular, Kurt Koenigsberger, Kenny Fountain, Kim Emmons, and Sarah Gridley, who have been simply phenomenal mentors. This dissertation could not have been realized without institutional support. I thank Martha Woodmansee and Ken Ledford for accepting me into and leading me through the Arts and Science Dissertation Fellowship. The insights and camaraderie I gained from my colleagues in the Dissertation Seminar did much to shape this dissertation. I also thank the English Department’s Graduate Committee for providing me with the Arthur Adrian Fellowship that gave me the resources needed to finish the dissertation. Finally, I thank Indiana University’s Lilly Library for its support through the Everett Helm Fellowship that allowed me to visit its Gordon Lish archive and find material necessarily for the dissertation. My many friends who supported me through the writing of this dissertation are some of the brightest and kindest people I’ve ever met—I am grateful for them all. Erika Olbricht and Mark Pedretti read and discussed the dissertation with me through various 5 stages of its composition. They helped me out of the corners I painted myself into and generally helped me figure out what it was I was doing. Danny Anderson came into the program at the same time as me, and though he beat me to finish line, the innumerable conversations we had on Guilford’s fourth floor, on trains and in cars, and at the Jolly Scholar (née Wackadoos), were the highlights of my graduate years. Mary Assad and Hannah Rankin provided me hugs and cupcakes and made Guilford 411 the best office in the building. My endless thanks go to Scott Weedon and Cara Miller for the many long nights we spent up to no good that helped keep me sane. Thanks to my friends at Lounge Leo, especially Michael Lenzo, for giving me a place to relax. Tremendous thanks to Matt Handley and Megan Stotts for putting me up, and putting up with me, in New York City. Special thanks Esti Brennan, just for being—no, defining—awesome. Thanks to my sisters and brothers-in-laws Lauren and Jerry Colley, and Jenna Addington and Ben Frech for, among many things, giving me a place to live and feeding me as I finished writing. And finally, thanks to my parents, Jim and Ann Addington, for their unconditional love and without for whom I literally would not be here. 6 Discipline and Publish: Creative Writing Programs, Literary Markets, and the Short Story Renaissance Abstract By ROBERT WELLING ADDINGTON This dissertation examines the aesthetic revival of the short story in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Traditionally, the short story, most often published in the pages of mass-market weeklies such as The Saturday Evening Post, was understood as a primarily commercial genre written for money, not status. The growth of creative writing programs in postwar America offered a new institutional home for literary production and presented favorable circumstances for the short story’s revival: the brevity of the short story made it an ideal genre of fiction for study and composition in writing workshops, while the increase in the number of university-housed journals provided writers venues in which to publish and accrue prestige. By removing the short story from its position as a commercial genre, creative writing programs reframed the value of the short story and emphasized its aesthetic possibilities. Creative writing programs helped create a renaissance of interest in the short story form that I trace through the examples of four figures: John Cheever, Gordon Lish, Lorrie Moore, and Lee Abbott. Cheever’s omnibus, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), helped reveal the commercial market for short story collections and showed that writers could 7 obtain literary recognition by writing in the genre. Gordon Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver’s stories, in which he applied his experimental literary tastes to Carver’s traditionally realist stories, created a new aesthetic for the short story—literary minimalism—that emphasized sentence-level stylistics rather than details and characterization. Lorrie Moore’s first collection, Self-Help (1985), relates a tension found in creative writing workshops between self-expression and disciplined writing to the sense of a self in need of help found in self-help guides. That relation plays out in the pursuit of an aesthetic self—a self in an act of artistic creation—that Moore offers as an ideal mode for living a satisfying life. Lee Abbott serves as representational figure for what it means to be a working writer in the university. While never achieving commercial success, Abbott has found acclaim within creative writing programs, and his career reflects the possibilities available to academic writers. 8 Introduction I. Lamenting the lack of short story collections in 1964, the writer, editor, scholar, and short story advocate William Peden acknowledged “the short story in book form has with only occasional exceptions been a dismal financial failure and for decades book publishers were reluctant to publish collections of short stories by individual authors” (2). The short story, long a staple of mass circulation periodicals, foundered in a commercial book trade that privileged novels over their shorter siblings. By 1983, expectations had shifted, as Alfred A. Knopf’s editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb revealed to the New York Times, noting, “Twenty years ago the conventional wisdom held that the publisher should shudder when an author said, ‘You’ve done three of my novels. Now I want a collection of stories.’ That is no longer the case” (Applebaum 35). The success of several collections, especially works by John Cheever and Raymond Carver published by Knopf, suggested that the literary marketplace was more congenial to short stories than it traditionally had been. The shifting of commercial expectations for short story collections between the 1960s and 1980s is significant for it signals a greater reevaluation of the genre. This project focuses on that reevaluation: that short story collections came to sell well in the 1980s is no accident, but it is also only one aspect of a greater cultural shift that revived interest in the short story form. The short story, I argue, benefitted from the rise of creative writing programs that created new contexts, both market and institutional, for its production and dissemination and, consequently, revived interest in the short story form. To assert that there was a revival of interest in the short story presupposes that the 9 short story had been to some extent marginalized in the field of literary production. From the 1880s to the 1950s, the short story was a commercially successful form, but that commercial success, if anything, led to a critical devaluation of the genre in general. Peden offers a reason for
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