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A waggish Wikipedia editor got away with a quick prank just after the recent Nobel Prize for literature was announced: For about 10 minutes, on the bio page of laureate Patrick Modiano, a subsection was titled "To The Reporter Now Copying From Wikipedia." It read: "Be careful boy. Primary sources are still best for journos."

The joke was on the whole of North America, pretty much. Our entire intelligentsia responded to the announcement with "Who?" Modiano, it turns out, is a well-known novelist in France – he had already won the most prestigious literary prize there, the Goncourt, and he had co-written the screenplay for Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, which was nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar in 1975 (I found that out from Wikipedia, too).

The thing is, we don't know France. We don't know too much literature not written in English, as a matter of fact. The stern men of the Swedish Academy, who select Nobel laureates, like to rub this in American faces. They have variously hinted as hard as can be hinted that the year when another U.S. writer can expect to be awarded the prize will be an exceptional year, indeed. Don't hold your breath.

The most truculent and obvious of the anti-Americans of the Academy is the garrulous Horace Engdahl, a university professor who complained in 2008 that Yankee writers don't read any books in translation and this leaves their literature dull.

Recently, he came out with more unsolicited advice for the world's dominant culture: Your creative writing courses are not helping your literary quality, he said. Interviewed by French Catholic newspaper La Croix just before the prize winner was announced, he scorned American literary culture for being dominated by universities and their students. Even grants and teaching positions, he said, have a negative effect, because they "cut writers off from society" and create "an unhealthy link with institutions."

The result, he claimed, is literature that doesn't take many risks. He suggested that writers take jobs such as "taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters" to make a living instead.

He slammed contemporary literary journalism as well, for mixing up actual criticism with reporting on "merchandise," a practice that confuses the meritorious with the merely popular. Engdahl regrets a lack of "hierarchization" and "centre" among genres. I would guess he sees this postmodern laxity as also an essentially American trait.

The guy basically just doesn't like the United States. That's understandable, if not exactly rational: European intellectuals don't want to see the U.S. dominate global art the way it already dominates popular entertainment and geopolitics and every other thing. Some have already detected evidence of this creep toward hegemony in the recent decision of the Man Booker Prize to admit American writers to the competition; they say it will eliminate the Commonwealth character of the prize, which it probably will.

Not surprisingly, Modiano is not a graduate of a master of fine arts program, and indeed never took any formal creative writing classes. Those things, too, are basically American, and also in the process of being exported around the world, like McDonald's and Batman. One can't help but see the acclamation of this writer as a kind of snub of U.S.-style MFAs themselves.

Engdahl is not the only one to question the MFA effect on literature. Indeed, creative writing as academic discipline has been under attack for some years now, including from inside the U.S. This is because a massive economic change has occurred: It is simply more difficult for literary writers to attract large enough audiences to support themselves through the marketplace, even with critical success, so universities have become their benefactors.

The result is that the ideal book-buyer for a novelist or poet is not just the reader, it is the prospective university employer. And writers enrol in MFA programs not just to better their craft but to gain professional credentials so that they may themselves become teachers in MFA programs. It's an odd new state of affairs.

A detailed history of the discipline in the U.S., The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl, came out in 2009 and spurred animated debates about whether the fiction produced in a university environment was too uniform or precious. Then came various essays denouncing the workshop model, notably a widely circulated piece from last February in the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Eric Bennett. Called "How Iowa Flattened Literature," it described the author's disappointment with his experience at the fabled Iowa Writers' Workshop, the granddaddy of all of them.

Then novelist Chad Harbach started an important discussion about the economics of all this, with an influential essay called "MFA vs NYC." It distinguished between two current models of earning a living as a writer in the U.S. – from a university salary or from book sales. (Harbach came down on the side of the MFA as incubator of more original fiction than the bestseller lists.)

For what it's worth, I teach creative writing in an MFA program and have not, over several years, noticed any particular MFA style or subject matter emerge from the students. Their work is as varied as any national literature can be. We do have art schools for painting, after all, and we don't constantly worry over whether painting can be taught. Nor do I think it seemly for a professor at a Swedish university to lecture artists on how they should be working as taxi drivers or waiters.

Engdahl was in fact hilariously taken down after his French interview, by a British poet named Tim Clare, whose blog entry was titled "Creative Writing Courses Aren't Killing Literature – Sanctimonious Rich White Tossers Are." Clare suggests – in saltier language than this – that working full-time in minimum-wage jobs actually prevents people from writing literature.

All these arguments are about economics, actually, rather than about national literary characteristics. Well, they should be, anyway. The Swedish Academy has somehow managed to make a celebration of literature into a petty slight against one country's intellectual culture, and that just seems like grumpy, reactionary conservatism.

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