Jazzy ([info]jazzyd) wrote,
@ 2007-04-01 20:14:00
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Anis Shivani — "Why Is American Fiction in Its Current Dismal State?"

Wow. Read this in the current issue of Pleiades. Mixed emotions right now. All I can say is it definitely had an impact.

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[info]rask0lnik
2007-04-02 01:58 am UTC (link)
I have never understood the point of an MFA in any writing-related field.

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[info]jazzyd
2007-04-02 02:05 am UTC (link)
For me it has nothing to do with the degree and everything to do with the opportunity to write for 2 years in a workshop setting. I've been warned by MFA students that some programs do more harm than good -- I'm wary of that.

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[info]jazzyd
2007-04-02 05:04 am UTC (link)
Also, hilariously, the very next piece in the issue was a fiction story which started with a girl remembering a time when, at a young age, she was sitting in the backseat of her mother's car. I would have crawled up into a little ball and wept if that had been my piece.

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[info]meandmyradio
2007-04-02 06:02 am UTC (link)
The article makes some valid points, but its overarching point (that the domestic is somehow less interesting, less valid and less important than the "real world," which Shivani never really attempts to define beyond the fact that it is more political than whatever's currently being written) is both silly and borderline sexist (given that writing about relationships, emotions, and the smaller everyday minutiae of life is generally associated with women's writing). Come on -- Shivani claims that "without much experience of the real world—other than family matters, like divorce or abandonment, or personal incidentals like menstruation, abortion, or mental illness," writing becomes trivial. Yet for most people, that's what the world consists of! That is the real world. Most people are not running around on Russian battlefields or interpreting their lives through a nihilistic lens or doing whatever Shivani thinks this "real world" entails. Which, of course, does not mean that people can't or shouldn't write about those things -- I just don't see how stories that involve "the back seat of my parents' car" are inherently less valid or important than politics or whatever else Shivani apparently thinks is worth writing about.

When you keep in mind that every writer named in that article was the Greatest Writer of His Age . . . you can't expect 50 or even 10 percent of the writers out there now to live up to that standard. For every wonderful writer, there's going to be 50,000 forgettable ones -- this was true then, and it was true during Kafka's time and Dos Passos' too. I don't think that there are a whole lot of people out there who legitimately believe that Dave Eggers is the best and most interesting writer of the last twenty years, or that he will be for the next twenty years. I don't know, I don't buy it.

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[info]jazzyd
2007-04-02 06:07 am UTC (link)
Okay, forgive me, I'll elaborate later when it isn't 1 am...but I agree, and this was why my feelings were mixed. On some level I sympathized with his frustration, but at the same time -- yeah. Okay, whatever, I'm an idiot right now. But you hit the nail on the head.

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[info]cornerrider
2007-04-02 08:14 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, I agree to some extent, especially that Shivani's definitely got a sexist slant and that he never really defines his own terms enough to make his point clear.
This article would have benefited from a good editor. It was still really intense, though, especially for those of us who write. When Shivani gets really concrete and specific, I often find myself very much agreeing with him, or at least very much provoked into thought and reflection, but when he's just like "Yeah, and so lots of writers suck" for an entire paragraph, he loses me.
Jazzy: I kind of want to talk about this article at length sometime. It's intense.

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