How the CIA Created American “Literature”

We talk about genre fiction (which I happen to write) as that stuff that “isn’t real literature” because we know what real literature is supposed to be. But what if “real literature” is actually a genre of its own, created for a particular purpose, for a particular audience, that has somehow hoodwinked the readership of the American audience.

Enter the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The first MFA in the country, and the most prestigious, it has held sway over what we call “real literature” in this country since the 1930s. And it is a “literature” that has elements that are as specific as mystery, science fiction, fantasy, or romance. It examines the internal life, mostly domestic, of mostly middle class/upper middle class white (mostly) men who grapple with those eternal American values of Individualism and Independence. Those values, of course, generally win in the end even if our protagonists don’t, and we are enlightened by their struggles.

What if this entire literature, including the means by which it was, and is, produced, is a lie?

What if we learned, as we did in February of 2014, when Eric Bennett published his article “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that the venerable Iowa Workshop method, teaching, and definition, of “good” literature, were actually a CIA backed plot?

This is not a conspiracy theory. Well researched and confirmed by various academics, we now understand how this came about. The issue now is, how to we unlearn it? What is worth keeping from the Iowa model, and what is pure propaganda?

As a writer, a storyteller, and a teacher of creative writing, I find myself questioning every element of my training. Is what I tell my students profoundly prejudiced? Is “show don’t tell” or “kill your darlings”, both techniques writers in present day American schools learn bone deep, really geared toward creating a specific anti-Communist literature for the Cold War? Is the method of the Workshop itself geared toward the white men who mostly populated it, and does it harm marginalized people who participate?

And what about the three-act structure as the canonical way to approach long form story telling? The Hero’s Journey? Even “Save the Cat”, which incorporates both?

How do we dismantle what is harmful without destroying those elements that do add to good storytelling? How much of what is intrinsic in the Iowa model inhibiting storytelling from marginalized people? Inhibiting the “literary” world from accepting other forms of storytelling as equally worthy? And how do we create a new way forward that can include and honor all peoples’ stories, but still push forward the best and insist on standards? What are the standards?

About the Author

Shariann Lewitt

Shariann Lewitt is the author of seventeen novels under five different names, spanning the genres of hard science fiction, fantasy, and young adult. Her short fiction has been widely published and her story “Fieldwork” was selected for Thirty-Fourth Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Gardner Dozois.

A third generation Manhattanite, Lewitt moved to the greater Boston area in 2000 and has become a proud citizen of the Red Sox Nation. She dropped out of pre-law to study evolutionary/population biology in college—because law school looked dismal, and she was afraid of fainting in bio lab like she did in high school. She did her graduate work at Yale and never returned to live in NYC. When not writing in local coffee shops, she teaches at MIT, plays with her pet parrots, and travels as widely as possible.

For any questions, please contact artivism@adelphi.edu.

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