“TRANSCENDENT EXILES”: THE CULTURES OF AMERICAN FICTION

Literary scholar Mark McGurl asserts that creative writing programs represent significant development in the history of American literary production. Essayist Chad Harbach then asserted the expansion of the MFA program created two cultures of American fiction. This research explores whether writers of color and female writers possess intellectual or economic spaces in this new and changed landscape of American fiction to produce experimental fiction, the kind of fiction considered canon-worthy or avant-garde to push the envelope of the form of fiction. The research also questions the validity of whether MFAs have altered the state of American fiction, incorporating bibliography from a collection of contemporary novelists, short story writers, essayists, literary theorists, and academics on the present state of US literary culture which surrounds writers. Constituent parts of these dynamics include not just creative writing pedagogical methods (the influence of which appears negligible) but also program types based on funding, publishing houses, organized readings, writing prizes, literary magazines, and more of what would be called US literary culture. Here, the findings suggest the ethnic writer travels more dire straits than her contemporaries as she enters the premises of an institution of higher education, where she finds herself caught in the paradox created by American democracy, which leads to questioning the influence and value of American higher education on the fiction of writers of color and female writers.