Understanding the MFA Short Story as a Capitalist Catalyst
By AnnaClare Sung
Edited by Mathieu Lajoie & Paige Suhl
Clueless, Madonna, the Internet––the 1990s marked a shift in American technological innovation and pop culture. As the entertainment industry entered a new age, so did the literary field. The Program Era1 saw a steep and sudden rise in creative writing programs across the United States, particularly in Masters of Fine Arts (MFA).2 But the desire to teach and hone writing skills posed an issue––novels, the reigning creative form, were unfit due to their length––crafting these long-form stories took time that professors and students could not dedicate. Enter the short story, whose amended form nestled perfectly into creative writing pedagogy. Though fitting for the program, the short story has flaws. Its length and “autopoetic” style generate a system that creates and upholds an insular culture industry within the MFA program, converting students into worker/consumer beings and exploiting students of color’s identities and experiences. Looking at the short story’s form through Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critiques of mass culture, we can understand how this structure develops. In understanding its aesthetic content alongside Sylvia Federici’s theories about women during the rise of capitalism, we can see the short story’s similar impact on students of color, as the economic structure exploits their bodies and experiences.
While often seen simply as a piece of prose fiction, the short story is also a commodity. In their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno and Horkheimer explain how, with the rise of capitalism, art was emancipated from the bourgeois field and entered mass culture. Upon this shift in the market, art became “conditioned by the commodity economy.”3 Its value changed, no longer contingent on whatever symbolic capital it possessed, relying on consumer taste and mass marketability. In its many forms, art was commodified.4 As art became more accessible to the general population, it entered more formal structures––namely the entertainment industry. MFA students, through their education, interact with the short story as though it were a form of entertainment. As Adorno and Horkheimer write, “Entertainment… is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again.”5 The MFA student attempts just this––pursuing a passion that seems to exist beyond such processes, yet finding they operate within the very system. In this way, we can think of such students pursuing an education where they produce stories for "entertainment."
In its structure, the short story functions as a novel amended; it is a condensed and streamlined narrative. Due to the creative writing program’s structure, Chad Harbach says, “attentions of one’s instructor and peers are best suited to the consideration of short pieces, which can be marked up, cut down, rewritten.”6 In a mechanized manner, MFA students can churn out story after story in a short period. The short story’s format lends itself to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of mass culture’s “promissory note of pleasure,” which considers how the culture industry capitalizes off consumers’ anticipatory pleasure, never fulfilling the full breadth of those consumers' expectations.7 In his essay on the NYC writer versus the MFA writer, Harbach explains how “a writer’s early short stories… lead to a novel, or they lead nowhere at all.”8 By withholding the novel structure from MFA students, the university, or MFA program, essentially acts as the culture industry in promising something (the potential to write a novel) that is insufficiently imparted by the short story. However, those experiencing this stilted gratification are not mass consumers buying the short stories –– they are the MFA students reading their classmates’ pieces in workshops. Thus, within the MFA’s culture industry, students are both workers and consumers of the short story.
The MFA student’s role as a simultaneous worker/consumer has much to do with the short story’s position within culture. Generally considered high art, prestige literature obtains more worth than art catered to the masses, perhaps due to its symbolic capital. Art’s value, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, scopes beyond economics within the culture industry. They explain how consumers can develop a sort of “fetish,” a phenomenon where “the social valuation which [consumers] mistake for the merit of works of art… becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy.”9 In this artistic outlook, superficial worth (deserved or undeserved) supersedes content. Though sufficiently reductive, Adorno and Horkheimer’s takeaways prove quite meaningful. Not all works MFA students produce will deserve praise, but they undeniably pursue symbolic capital. When the prestige of the novel is replaced with a slush pile of student-worker-produced short stories, however, merit perhaps overtakes artistic vision, and those same student consumers revel in their symbolic value.
It is within these very aspirations that MFA students are condemned as agents within the culture industry, as “art’s unbounded proximity to those exposed to it, no longer mediated by money, completes the alienation between work and consumer.”10 In this way, the short story leads students to their cyclical worker/consumer role, as they are either writing their own story or reading one of their peers. MFA short story commodification then does not exist at the end of production (where the short story is bought and read by the general public), but on the creation end (within the workshop where it is created by one student and read by another). This idea complicates Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument, as the MFA short story’s existence does not just lessen the gap between work and consumer but fuses them to create an individual simultaneously producing and consuming the same commodity.
The MFA short story’s form exposes the medium’s existence within a culture industry of its own. Its content, when put in conversation with Silvia Federici’s musings on women’s exploitation during the rise of capitalism, reveals much about how that existence impacts MFA students of color in particular. In Federici’s essay, she writes that “gender should not be considered a purely cultural reality, but should be treated as a specification of class relations.”11 Comparable to economic groups, gender differentiates quality of life and opportunity; race functions similarly in general American society and within the creative writing program. The MFA claims diversity while furthering oppressive functions under higher education. Creative writing programs exist within two categories of universities: debt generators and fully funded.12 While many differences exist between the two, race is one of the most prominent; Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young explain this phenomenon, saying, “In 2013, 28 percent of students at debt-generator schools identified as other than white… At fully funded programs, only 19 percent of students identified as other than white.”13 Given the already marginalized positions of American POC, one can see how these debt-generators further perpetuate structural racism, as a larger proportion of POC students go into debt receiving their MFAs.
Racial inequity persists within the MFA through the short story style that professors teach students. “Autopoetics” is the foundation of the MFA short story and centers the story around an author’s experience, fictionalized. To use “autopoetics” is to be self-referential, to “write what you know.”14 Under this umbrella term lies high cultural pluralism, which employs and intertwines high-modernist aesthetics and content relating to ethnic particularities. In Nam Le’s short story titled “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the main character, an MFA student, hears firsthand how members of the literary community regard high cultural pluralism. He recalls speaking to a writing instructor at the bar, who said, “ethnic literature’s hot,” a peer who explained how he was “sick of ethnic lit,” and a literary agent who claimed that unique “background and life experience,” is what will help young writers stand out.15 Stories using high cultural pluralism in this short story, just as in real life, penetrate the cultural zeitgeist with the discord surrounding their existence. Despite individual opinion, one thing persists: the inevitable correlation between high cultural pluralism and racial exploitation.
It is interesting to look at the authors writing these stories using high cultural pluralism alongside what Federici writes about women and domestic labor during the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with what she calls “the marginalization of the midwife,” women began losing authority in the delivery room, and male doctors gained control. Midwives and neighbors alike constantly surveilled women, who “in Protestant countries and towns… were supposed to spy on women and report all relevant sexual details.”16 Lacking privacy, control, and contraceptives, women’s “wombs,” she explains, “became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation.”17 The government used women’s bodies as objects to stimulate economic growth. Heavily monitoring reproduction, they could control and increase the number of births, creating more future workers who could generate profit.
Students and graduates of color operate similarly to Federici’s restrained woman and their stories resemble the women’s Federici addresses. In Le’s story, the main character attends a party for “the [Iowa Writers] workshop’s most recent success… a Chinese woman…who had written a book of short stories about Chinese characters in stages of immigration to America…she’d been offered a six-figure contract for a two-book deal.”18 This author’s book is inextricably linked to the MFA culture industry, with it being a collection of “ethnic” short stories and her being a graduate of the program. When the Chinese writer is invited back to do a reading, her name generates symbolic capital for the university, transforming into economic capital when she inspires new students to apply to that MFA.19 Just as women’s bodies were policed along with capitalism’s rise, authors of color’s experiences became co-opted by the MFA program and used for their gain; women’s reproduction further assists in building the capitalist workforce and racialized stories further uphold the MFA’s culture industry. They work to extract the same capitalist structures that Adorno and Horkheimer critique: systems where art becomes commodity due to mass culture’s economic demands. Furthermore, not only does race act as an ”exotic” differentiator that will sell more copies, but the style it is embedded in will provide more gratification for the MFA student-reader. It is the high cultural pluralism that contributes to a story’s symbolic capital.
High cultural pluralism, when executed well, holds a certain amount of prestige and exclusivity, given that racial identity is such an integral component and only those with racialized identities can achieve the style. But this intangible value risks students of color’ self-exploitation and even, as shown in “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the exploitation of their families. To his father, on whom Le’s main character bases his short narrative, he says, “‘I’ll write it anyway… if I write a true story… I’ll have a better chance of selling it.”20 Such desperation to achieve this aesthetic, a result of his peers and superiors repeatedly praising “ethnic stories,” leads the main character to write something he’s struggling to grapple with morally, as it profits from his father’s ethnic story.
High cultural pluralism can have racially oppressive implications when in the university setting because of its exploitative nature. Beyond this effect, the style also maintains a certain degree of separation between the upper and lower classes, contributing further to those systems of oppression. Parsing the three words defining the aesthetic, one can see how the term is contradictory; high culture implies elitism, but pluralism requires diversity. Such works and their origins are prime examples of Adorno’s bourgeois aesthetic model, where the artist mediates between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Their short stories, using a high cultural form such as modernism, cater to individuals typically associated with or belonging to the “elite.” When cultural pluralism is incorporated and blended with these stylistic choices, it brings a certain (perhaps) working-class perspective and organizes it within an (often simplistic) format that the elite can easily digest. Because the bourgeoisie, or the American upper-class majority, is traditionally and historically white, exploiting students of color’s identities and experiences through these stylistic short stories can be either detrimental or have the potential to ignite social change.
The MFA culture industry revolves around the short story, which becomes the MFA student’s entertainment in a commodity economy. Aligning with Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea of promissory pleasure, the short story as a form of entertainment leads MFA students to adopt a role existing outside of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theories: that of the simultaneous worker/consumer. As students transform into these capitalist agents, they begin creating according to the demand for art possessing symbolic capital, à la high cultural pluralism. The same structure that results from the short story then becomes the perpetrator of its style. Not unlike Federici’s patriarchal government, the MFA culture industry takes advantage of its students of color’s expressions through high cultural pluralism; leading to these students’ exploitation and further expanding the commodity culture Adorno and Horkheimer detest.
Although I have gone through a very grim detailing of the MFA short story and its surrounding systems, I am not nearly as pessimistic about the art form as I may sound. Despite its commodification and subsequent corruption, for lack of a better word, the short story has much to offer artistically and culturally to the literary field and the general public. Ultimately, I would ask––at what point does an object’s artistic value supersede its existence in a capitalist society? Can art’s intrinsic value overcome its commodification?
Endnotes
Coined by Mark McGurl, The Program Era refers to a period beginning post-WWII American History, when university creative writing programs began to rise, initially due to GI Bill funding and later because of more relaxed student loan laws.
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room,” in After the Program Era, ed. Loren Glass (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 149.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 127.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World reversed,” Poetics 12, no. 4–5 (1983): 37.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 127.
Chad Harbach, “MFA vs. NYC,” Slate, November 26, 2010,
https://slate.com/culture/2010/11/mfa-vs-nyc-america-now-has-two-distinct-literary-cultu res-which-one-will-last.html.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 111.
Harbach, “MFA vs. NYC.”
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 130.
Silvia Federici, The Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), 14.
Spahr and Young, “The Program Era,” 154.
Spahr and Young, “The Program Era,” 154.
Mark McGurl, “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction,” Critical Inquiry 32, no.1 (2005): 111.
Nam Le, The Boat, (London: Penguin Group, 2009), 8.
Federici, The Caliban and the Witch, 89.
Federici, The Caliban and the Witch, 89.
Le, The Boat, 11.
Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 68.
Le, The Boat, 25.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1972.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World reversed.” Poetics 12, no. 4–5 (1983): 29–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-422x(83)90012-8.
Federici, Silvia. The Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York, Autonomedia, 1994.
Harbach, Chad. “MFA vs. NYC.” Slate. November 26, 2010.
https://slate.com/culture/2010/11/mfa-vs-nyc-america-now-has-two-distinct-literary-cultu res-which-one-will-last.html.
Le, Nam. The Boat. London: Penguin Group, 2009.
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