TY - JOUR
AU - Kempf,, Christopher
AB - Abstract This article examines the first creative writing “workshop,” so called, in order to assess how present-day institutional practices restructure transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. Drawing on extensive archival research, I document the procedures of and theory behind drama professor George Pierce Baker’s “47 Workshop” at Harvard, operative from 1912 to 1924. Baker’s use of the term, I argue, provides rhetorical cover by which to slot arts courses into a Harvard curriculum increasingly geared toward utilitarian education. At the same time, the term signals Baker’s ties to the American Arts and Crafts movement, a cause opposed to industrialization just as Baker opposed the mass fare of Broadway. Reading Baker’s 1930 pageant Control for its advocacy of preindustrial values, the article concludes by contending that this distinct genealogy for creative writing helps us rethink the discipline today. If Baker understood workshop as an alternative, nonrationalized discourse, present-day craft rhetoric consolidates the authority of elite educational institutions. In a letter of 1 September 1912, dramatist and theater professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term workshop for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with his former students at Harvard and Radcliffe, the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. “What better place than this,” Baker wrote Elizabeth McFadden from the Coole Park home of Lady Gregory, “from which to write you of The Workshop, for that is what it seems to me we could call our experiment! ‘Experimental Theatre’ seems to me too grand” (qtd. in Kinne 166).1 Baker’s letter possesses the force of spontaneity, but adopting this term represented the culmination of months of intensive labor, Baker having scoured the Continent that summer researching the “new stagecraft” then sweeping European theaters. Baker would incorporate much of this stagecraft into the workshop he and his students envisioned, an innovative, technologically advanced dramatic practice the sophistication of which was belied, perhaps, in the nostalgic tone he adopted for McFadden. “As I write—a soft Irish rain silts down outside,” Baker wrote. “[I]n this high room lined with books, Mr. Yeats is answering his mail… . Lady Gregory has been playing with her grandson who in his jersey suit of Irish green looks like a gnome. I go on toward Belfast and the Ulster Players tomorrow” (qtd. in Kinne 167). On such a note—imbued with the elegiac calm of the twilight—Baker sounded the birth of a new and revolutionary pedagogy, to be called “workshop,” that has dramatically altered the theory and practice of literary composition. Baker’s goals for his own workshop were comparatively modest—namely, to “try out” the plays of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates, crafting them into stage productions and “workshopping” those productions for critical audiences (“47 Workshop” [1919] 185). Central to this vision was the concern, shared by Baker and his students alike, that workshop plays distinguish themselves from the “sordid commercial tone” of Broadway, a concern registered clearly in McFadden’s appeal to what, in the following pages, I call craft rhetoric (“Letter”). In contrast to the formulaic productions of Broadway, the workshopped drama would be a labor of love, fulfilling for “the sheer pleasure of the doing,” according to McFadden, but fastidiously technical, too, in its integration of turn-of-the-century stagecraft. “Equipping . . . students with the power to work happily,” McFadden wrote from the Hotel Charlesgate in Boston, “and inspiring them with high ideals for their work seems to me to be a greater ‘result’ than enabling them to put money in their pockets and to drink of the heady wine of Broadway” (“Letter”). McFadden’s craft rhetoric, prominent throughout her decade-long correspondence with Baker, was hardly incidental. The theatrical intervention both she and Baker anticipated—a new mode of dramatic realism committed, as Baker put it, to “the just representation of life”—necessitated an approach to theater as a total art, a form in which playwright, producer, scenic artist, electrician, and stage mechanic might “labor until the stage is fitted to represent life as the author sees it” (Dramatic 15). Only, Baker believed, through the “total development of the drama as a form”—the well-crafted drama, I will call it—would US audiences learn to appreciate more than Broadway spectacle and cabaret excess (“Theater” 4). Baker’s workshop would thus serve a pedagogical function not only for its members, but for a wider theater-going public whose taste it endeavored to elevate; by midcentury, indeed, the realist, psychologically insightful drama would be a dominant mode, one first forged in the experimental crucible that came to be known—after Baker’s course of the same number—as the 47 Workshop.2 While McFadden and other former students would remain involved in the Workshop, I focus in this essay on the material and ideological frameworks supplied by Baker himself, director of and leading advocate for the Workshop for which he is most widely known. Even though he began his career at Harvard in 1888 as a professor of rhetoric, Baker eventually shifted his priorities to dramatic literature and playwriting, teaching those subjects until 1925 before leaving—when Harvard balked at the construction of a new theater—to found the renowned Yale School of Drama. Along the way, Baker would prove a major influence on the early twentieth-century Little Theater Movement, counting among his students New Playwrights Theatre associate John Dos Passos, Neighborhood Playhouse founder Agnes Martin, and onetime Provincetown Player Eugene O’Neill. Baker, as I will show, also became an instrumental figure in American pageantry, a hugely popular genre in which he found ample room—more, even, than in the realist drama—for experimenting with his ambitious new stagecraft. Tracing Baker’s craft rhetoric to the turn-of-the-century American Arts and Crafts movement, I propose that the theory and practice of craft allowed Baker to achieve several interrelated institutional and aesthetic objectives. In the first place, craft provided Baker a set of values by which to reposition US literature within its institutional context, including the immediate milieu of Harvard and the wider context of Broadway theater. Second, Baker recognized the craft production of literature as a way to rethink the meaning and ramifications of labor writ large: while Baker’s opposition to a rapidly evolving industrial regime stopped short, perhaps, of Dos Passos’s early radicalism, he pointedly and repeatedly challenged the priorities of industrialization, warning in a 1930 pageant written for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) against the surrender of preindustrial values. In other words, as labor—in the form of craft rhetoric—entered institutions of higher education, “workshop” itself became a laboring force in US culture.3 One critical tenet of this essay, then, holds that the earliest creative writing workshop, so called, constituted the site of what Gramscian disciple Rudi Dutschke termed a “long march through the institutions,” a struggle in which the working and middle classes might, in time, produce their own authentic, noncommercial culture. Though neither Baker nor the 47 Workshop harbored revolutionary ambitions, we might understand both as equipping cultural workers with the tools for deconstructing regnant cultural formations, particularly by rivaling the sentimental and often shoddily produced “mass” theater (qtd. in Kimball 14–15). This essay challenges, then, interpretations of US antimodernism that view early twentieth-century craftsmanship as a means of easing accommodation to new and rationalized modes of labor. In T. J. Jackson Lears’s reading, for example, craft revivalists “promised not social transformation but therapeutic self-renewal within a corporate structure of degraded work and bureaucratic ‘rationality’” (69). Baker, I contend, promised something else entirely, mobilizing craft rhetoric to serve a genuinely oppositional, perhaps even revolutionary, artistic movement. I submit, pace Lears, that not all forms of nonradical antimodernism represented accommodation, a with-us-or-against-us mentality that too easily abandons the vast middle ground in which the majority of cultural formations play out. A second, more substantial tenet of my argument is its claim for a distinct history of the discipline we have come to know as creative writing, a history that actually originates in a genre since expelled from the standard creative writing curriculum—the drama. In documenting the Arts and Crafts impetus of the 47 Workshop, I question, in particular, Mark McGurl’s contention that creative writing begins in the classrooms of progressive education. Indeed, McGurl’s curious statement that the term workshop seems “odd when . . . used to describe George Pierce Baker’s playwriting classes at pompous old Harvard” is somewhat misleading, the result of a selective history that reads forward into midcentury creative writing programs an aesthetic and institutional complexity that predates them (149). Neither neutral nor arbitrary, workshop coordinated a network of conflicting values, signaling, as it did so, the affiliations of creative writing with an American Arts and Crafts movement to which—in its instantiation as the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston (SACB)—Baker enjoyed both material and ideological ties. Like the American Arts and Crafts movement, the 47 Workshop challenged the distinction between manual and mental labor, prizing engaged, expressive work in all aspects of the new stagecraft. “When he has assisted in lighting,” Baker wrote in a promotional piece, the playwright “will be less likely to ask the light man to provide the atmosphere and the subtler gradations of feeling which it is his business to provide by his text” (“47 Workshop” [1919] 193–94). Moreover, Baker held this stagecraft to fastidiously technical standards, carefully selecting audience members, for example, to ensure that such standards were critically enforced. For craft adherents, the synthesis of expressive labor and guild-like programmatic discipline—what I term a craft ideal—provided a way to reconcile the conflicting values of beauty and utility, fostering within an industrial regime what SACB journal Handicraft described as “the love of good and beautiful work as applied to useful service” (1.1: 2). For Baker, likewise, workshop provided the rhetorical cover necessary to slot aesthetic production into Harvard’s increasingly utilitarian curriculum; in this respect, Baker hoped to transform a US theater industry in which commercial considerations had long entailed the deprivileging of aesthetic standards. Baker himself was a close associate of New York theater managers who looked to him for the material techniques and ideological framework—and, of course, the writers—of a new mode of dramatic realism. As the “father of modern American playwrights” according to his obituaries, he was certainly well connected within that industry (qtd. in Kinne 1). Sustained examination of Baker’s legacy, moreover, reveals how an untold history of creative writing craft shapes the theory and practice of the discipline in the contemporary university, where creative writing has ballooned to over 300 graduate MFA programs, and where attendance at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) routinely exceeds 20,000. If Baker understood workshop as an alternative, nonrationalized discourse, present-day craft rhetoric has come in contrast to underwrite the lucrative—and somewhat paradoxical—craft industry that is creative writing. 1. The 47 Workshop 1.1 “Pulchritudo Cum Utilitate”: SACB Throughout the Craftsman period of the 1890s, the SACB remained the largest and most active organization in a rapidly expanding American Arts and Crafts movement. A leader in craftsmanship since the colonial era, Boston was fertile ground for the movement, its adherents drawn from a closely knit network of educators, architects, artists, and idlers comprising the city’s cultural elite. Interlinked by marriage and board memberships, these “craftsmen”—among them Astors, Longfellows, and Coolidges—sought further to parlay their economic prosperity into cultural capital, defining standards of “beauty” and “utility” and enforcing those standards through various institutional endeavors.4 This was a Brahmin class, one with strong ties to Harvard. Baker’s closest link with SACB, however, was Craftsman Henry Hunt Clark, a professor at Boston’s MFA School and an expert in staging and set design for the 47 Workshop. It was likely Clark who convinced Baker to seek financing for a theater building among SACB’s well-heeled elite. “They have given us our Art Museum,” Baker wrote of this group. “Is there no one who by his skill as a leader and organizer . . . will establish a theatre?” (qtd. in Kinne 85, 86). Heterogeneous in ethos and ambition, SACB endorsed multiple institutional forms, from manual training programs integrating aesthetic and vocational education to an experimental Handicraft Shop near Boston Common, where, as in medieval workshops, craftsmen could benefit from one another’s technical expertise in lacemaking, silverwork, and other craft practices.5 SACB also attempted a quasi-transcendentalist community designed to broaden, as an editorial in Handicraft described it, “the intelligence and capabilities of both the farmer who becomes a craftsman and the craftsman who turns in part farmer.” “We would be much interested,” the editorial implores, “to learn of any instances of the actual working out of this plan” (3.1: 34, 35). As the tone here suggests, the failure of a number of these schemes has led many critics to read American Arts and Crafts generally as a dead-end venture, unable to develop a “truly oppositional culture” (Boris 209). Or it was understood as co-opted by corporate interests and “packaged . . . into a consumer proposition” (Bowman 3), even as it contributed to a stratified education system with “different subjects for different classes” of citizen (Cooke 24). Common among these postmortems—which are not entirely inaccurate—is a tendency to think of institutions like SACB in terms of their opposition to and accommodation of an evolving industrial regime, a framework that Lears first proposes in his influential account of turn-of-the-century antimodernism. For Lears, the American Arts and Crafts movement represented an “accommodationist” platform designed to “fit[] individuals into . . . bureaucratic hierarch[ies]” by providing a therapeutic outlet for creativity and autonomy; craft ideologues drew back, therefore, from “fundamental social change” or the imaging of a “truly alternative culture” (64, 79, 65). Such crisp binaries, I suggest, are the terms of fairy tale, a hindsight moralism that ignores how opposition and accommodation exist—almost always, and certainly in the case of SACB—as mutually constitutive processes. For among the most enduring contributions of the American Arts and Crafts movement—and there were many—was its maintenance of a craft ideal that held craftsmanship to fastidiously technical standards like those enforced by preindustrial guilds while, at the same time, promoting the craftsman’s expressive labor. Such an ideal sought to integrate, in other words, what Thorstein Veblen termed the “instinct of workmanship” with an instinct for “idle curiosity,” the former a “proclivity for taking pains” that served to discipline the artist’s expressive impulse (Higher 39; Instinct 33). This synthesis is neatly suggested in SACB procedures for evaluating—in juried exhibitions, live demonstrations, and gallery shows—the adherence of craft objects to standards of beauty and utility. While judges attended meticulously to basic design elements—shape, line, color, scale, and intensity among them—they also employed linguistic metaphors as a way of assessing a work’s “expression,” prizing unstudied or “vernacular” work, as one nineteenth-century critic put it, over objects viewed as “affected,” “pretentious,” or “strained,” all terms original to SACB judges. Effective craft, Lewis Day wrote, entailed “the translation of natural . . . form, not merely into the language of art, but into the dialect of some particular handicraft. We detect in it the homely accent of sincere workmanship” (qtd. in Brandt 54). It was this craft ideal that Baker translated into the operation and objectives of the 47 Workshop, where, as I show, the expression of the playwright was shaped and channeled by workshop critics who doubled as stagehands, set managers, and costume makers. Just as workers in the SACB Handicraft Shop collaborated on the chasing of silver tea services, 47 Workshop members labored over proper lighting techniques—frosted or bare bulbs, spot or floor angling—and how most effectively to “block” actors with respect to their illumination. And this craft ideal came to redound throughout the subsequent history of creative writing, manifest from Providence to Palo Alto as “programmatic self-expression,” in McGurl’s phrase. Such a phenomenon began, then, long before Paul Engle set foot on the fertile banks of the Iowa River (11). Equally integral to Baker’s pedagogy—if less immediately so to those workshops succeeding his—was reconciling, in SACB terms, “Beauty with Usefulness,” specifically his effort to adjust aesthetic production to the imperatives of an increasingly utilitarian system of higher education. More than simply a “Boston society shibboleth,” as Lears holds, this reconciliation constituted SACB’s most prominent form of opposition to industrialization, its standards disseminated nationwide as part of the organization’s work to elevate public taste in Boston and beyond (77). Contemporary craft critics indeed viewed their mission as itself a pedagogical gambit, laying a foundation for economic reorganization by reeducating the public; specifically, craft advocates taught consumers to demand greater refinement from the products they purchased, advocating a product’s handcrafted beauty—as well as its price—as indicating its utility. SACB’s official seal testifies to its anti-industrial impetus, the phrase “Pulchritudo cum Utilitate” forged in Gothic letters below a designer’s calipers, a claw hammer, an architect’s pen, and an artist’s brushes and palette (Brandt 108). Here, in miniature, was Baker’s stagecraft, a unity of the expressive arts held to fastidious technical standards. The American Arts and Crafts movement, to be sure, was animated by nostalgic ideology, one never “fully linked to Progressive politics in America,” as Wendy Kaplan diagnoses (“Lamp” 59). And its effort to elevate public taste and enforce cultural standards positions it squarely within an emerging middlebrow sensibility dedicated—as in the Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926—to the cultural uplift of a democratic reading public.6 Its integration of expression and technique into a craft ideal, however—as well as its serious commitment to the reconciliation of beauty and utility—constituted meaningful, if momentary and nonradical, opposition to the degraded quality of life under industrialization. Such a movement paved the way, moreover, for more politically oriented modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s—including Dos Passos’s literary leftism and the experimentation of Black Mountain College, both taken up in longer versions of this project—and defined clear and consequential parameters of aesthetic production for the institutions within which those modernisms were crafted. Baker’s 47 Workshop was one such institution, its invocation of that term, workshop, signaling its affiliation with Arts and Crafts ideology while simultaneously providing the rhetorical cover with which, at Harvard, to legitimate the study and production of the drama. 1.2 “Pompous Old Harvard” “Whatever new courses in the drama you may teach, George, it is for your work in argumentation that Harvard pays you” (qtd. in Kinne 102). So, reportedly, spoke Harvard president Charles W. Eliot to Baker in 1900, when the latter had first introduced a course in contemporary drama that would become, 12 years later, the 47 Workshop. Eliot’s statement indicates unequivocally the values of the university he sought to transform, prizing, as he did, the work in logic, rhetoric, and argumentation that had made Baker a guru figure of sorts among turn-of-the-century businessmen. Though Baker was married to Eliot’s niece, the two would maintain an uneasy alliance throughout their time at Harvard, Baker perpetually weathering his superior’s efforts to divert his dramatic investments along more profitable lines. Eliot’s comments also indicate the difficulty Baker faced in adapting a course in dramatic production—English 47 and its attached Workshop—to Harvard’s utilitarian elective system. As Baker keenly perceived, such a system significantly imperiled the role of the arts in higher education. In employing craft rhetoric as a kind of rhetorical cover, Baker was responding to a broader utilitarian movement that had been gaining influence in US education since the end of the Civil War. The elective system was only the most famous—and controversial—expression of this movement, which entailed at Harvard the creation of an official graduate school, expansion of the faculty in newer, more professional disciplines, and subdivision of the responsibilities of the president into dozens of specialized offices, precursor to the Byzantine administrations of our own era. In theory, of course—and as its reputation leads one to believe—the elective system constituted a liberalizing force in higher education, empowering students with greater agency over their learning and loosening the grip of so-called classical pedagogy. Indeed, by the time Eliot’s reforms were implemented fully in 1899, the sole remaining requirements at Harvard consisted of freshman English and a course in either French or German, which could be anticipated at the preparatory level. That we imagine, however, that such changes led to the flourishing of ceramics courses—or to doe-eyed bohemians reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau or conservatories of aspiring Arnold Schoenbergs—testifies to how shrewdly Eliot peddled the elective system as fostering “[t]he natural bent and peculiar quality of every boy’s mind,” trumpeting “the happiness of the individual” as “sacredly regarded in his education” (“Scientific” 638). Nominally promoting individual freedom, in practice, the elective system subordinated that freedom to the needs of an industrializing nation, de-emphasizing a “well-rounded” education—a phrase Eliot loathed—in favor of professionalization. “In his freedom,” writes Laurence Veysey, “the student was supposed to become a trained expert in some special field,” with emphasis given to newer disciplines in engineering and the applied sciences (67). Eliot himself was fond of metaphorizing these transformations. “To reason about the average human mind as if it were a globe, to be expanded symmetrically from a centre outward, is to be betrayed by a metaphor,” he wrote in 1869. “A cutting-tool, a drill, or auger would be a juster symbol of the mind” (“New Education” 218). The imagery is telling of the ultimate values behind what Eliot called “the new education.” Geared toward utilitarian specialization rather than humanist breadth, such a pedagogy was intended to produce those well-trained experts, technologists, and engineers on whom an evolving industrial regime would depend. Even the practice of creative writing at Harvard—an occasional pursuit in advanced composition courses—prioritized professional forms like the newspaper article, the magazine feature, and the technical memo. In his inaugural address, Eliot waxed poetic about the potential of this new education, declaring that “[w]hen millions are to be fed . . . the single fish-line must be replaced by seines and trawls, the human shoulders by steam-elevators” (“Inaugural” 603). One professor at New York University put it even more succinctly—“The college has ceased to be a cloister and has become a workshop” (qtd. in Veysey 61). Baker felt sharply the deleterious effects of this utilitarian impetus. He rightly perceived that his work in the drama was considered, as Eliot put it, “second best” (Late 107) in comparison with more profitable endeavors, and his 1905 proposal for a course in dramatic technique was initially rejected by one faculty member as an “absurd interpretation of the elective idea” (qtd. in Kinne 102). Only when Baker rebranded the course as a response to growing demand for professional training in the drama—and only when he’d adopted the craft rhetoric of “workshop”—was his proposal finally accepted; his pedagogy was not, Baker once again stressed, the avant-garde insurrection of “experimental theater,” but serious labor in the useful and remunerative discipline of stagecraft. Due to lecture at the Sorbonne the following year, Baker would offer “English 47: The Technique of the Drama” for the first time in 1908–1909—the year, tellingly, of Eliot’s retirement.7 1.3 The Play’s A Thing: The 47 Workshop On Thursday evening, 23 January 1913, the 47 Workshop staged its first production at Agassiz House, Radcliffe College. Written and produced by Baker student W. Fenimore Merrill, the otherwise unremarkable three-act play, titled Lina Amuses Herself (Figures 1 and 2), was rudimentary compared to later workshop productions, its single largest expenses running to $14.00 for flowers, $8.36 for construction, and $3.28 for unspecified “damages from flashlight” (“Account”). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Opening day program for Lina Amuses Herself, the first production of the 47 Workshop, 23 January 1913. MS Thr 639 (3558). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Opening day program for Lina Amuses Herself, the first production of the 47 Workshop, 23 January 1913. MS Thr 639 (3558). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Invitation to Lina Amuses Herself for Mrs. George P. Baker. MS Thr 639 (3632). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Invitation to Lina Amuses Herself for Mrs. George P. Baker. MS Thr 639 (3632). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Despite its humble beginning—or owing, perhaps, to its necessary thrift—the 47 Workshop dramatically reshaped US theater in the decades to come, providing a crucible within which the realist, psychologically insightful drama, dominant by midcentury, was first forged. By the time that the 47 Workshop closed shop in 1924, a “literary awakening” had taken root among US audiences akin to the nineteenth-century development of the novel, according to Wisner Payne Kinne (68). And by the time Baker decamped for Yale in fall 1926, the 47 Workshop had become a household name, lauded in venues as diverse as Science, The Saturday Evening Post, and New Masses—the Workshop had done its work. Just as it reconciled aesthetic production to utilitarian education, the 47 Workshop also mediated between Harvard playwrights and an entertainment industry that had long privileged commercial success over aesthetic integrity. Broadway plays from the early twentieth century tended toward melodrama, light sentimentalism packaged in familiar, economically safe formulas and—organized around a robust star system—reinforcing the era’s belief in upward mobility. Moreover, American theater faced serious—if no more refined—competition from a booming film industry offering cheaper, more accessible mass entertainment.8 Baker opposed these modes, but he did not ignore them. Baker valued in such fare its ability to “amuse and entertain,” that is, its “utilitarian” function (“Theater” 8). In unpublished lecture notes, Baker distinguishes between the “utilitarian” and “ethical” functions of drama in the US, counterposing to its entertainment value the genre’s ability to employ “situation, dialogue, character not as ends in themselves, but as means of inculcating a thesis” (7). For Baker, both functions were integral to successful drama. Only by synthesizing “the technique and the artistic self-respect of the Ethical School,” he wrote, with “the understanding of audiences that belongs to the Utilitarian, can lasting and great drama come” (14). Baker’s dramaturgy, in other words, functioned as a “stretching device,” plying dramatic form until it simply contained and expressed more than conventional drama (Berkowitz 31). The mode resulting from such stretching was dramatic realism, the psychological depth and social complexity of which necessitated “almost perfect technique” and promoted, therefore, the “total development of the drama as a form” (“Theater” 4). More than mere “truckling” to one’s audience (to use Baker’s term) or didactic politicizing, dramatic realism entailed a well-crafted drama that included attention to scenery, music, stage mechanics, costumes, lighting, and even ushering. While Broadway stages had consisted of either extravagant spectacles or simple backdrops for larger-than-life stars, the realist stage assumed a defining power in serving “the just representation of life” (Dramatic 15). Jordan Miller and Winifred Frazer, in their excellent history of interbellum US drama, detail one example of how this innovative new stagecraft facilitated—and indeed necessitated—dramatic realism. “[W]hile darkening the auditorium was not unknown with the gas,” they write, “electric lighting could instantly place the house in total darkness.” “[A]s a result, the actors abandoned the custom of playing outward to a visible audience and turned inward to each other on the fully illuminated stage. The movement and stance of their characters became more natural, more representational” (30). Baker knew well the dramatic potential of lighting. When he first wrote McFadden of “The Workshop,” he had recently completed a tour of European theaters—including William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Irish nationalist Abbey Theatre—where lighting, mechanical, and electrical innovations had been dazzling audiences for years. Baker himself had experimented in the simulation of natural light with designer Mariano Fortuny’s revolutionary cyclorama dome; mounted behind the stage, it gave the illusion of an expansive sky on which the stage artist—by painting a system of reflective mirrors—could simulate clouds, rainfall, and even eclipses. “We still think too much in terms of candles and gas,” Baker wrote in 1925. The university theatre should not only train young electricians to lighting as real, as delicate, as suggestive as possible, but should abet them in all desired technical and imaginative experiments. Many an electrician thinks technically in watts and amperes, but not in terms of the imagination. Others riot in imagination, but are not properly based technically. Here, as elsewhere in the theatre, the leap inspired by imagination should be taken from a sure footing in technique. (“Theatre and the University” 104) Yoking inspiration and imagination—values redolent of self-expression—to the discipline of stage technique, Baker’s comments point, once more, to the affinities between the 47 Workshop and Arts and Craft ideology, a value system that understood “craft” as the dynamic implication of expressive labor and technical standards. If the expressiveness of dramatic realism required a revolutionary stagecraft, that stagecraft, Baker implies, made dramatic realism possible in the first place; form had become indissolubly bonded to content. In its attention to the aesthetic possibilities unique to dramatic form, the 47 Workshop might seem to anticipate what Clement Greenberg, after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, would famously label “medium specificity,” the idea that “to restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized” (66). Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Baker found that “the specialization of the time had come even into the drama,” most noticeably in the genre’s unifying—or omnivorous incorporation—of virtually every other art form, its maintenance of “the long-established relationship” among music, dance, poetry, painting, and architecture, as well as with mechanical arts like lighting and sound engineering (“Theater” 9–10). This integrative art did not merely respond to the dictates of dramatic realism, however. It was also the practical extension of Baker’s courses in the history and technique of the drama, including a course on Shakespeare that attended to, among other things, Inigo Jones’s stage architecture, the Elizabethan printing industry, the geography of London and its environs, curtain technologies, and the psychology of English as opposed to Continental audiences. Key to Shakespeare’s mastery of the early modern drama, Baker taught, was his command of cutting-edge stagecraft. The powerful structural irony at the beginning of act 3, scene 2 in Romeo and Juliet (1595), for instance—when Juliet, unaware that Romeo has been banished, declares that she will “cut him out in little stars,” so unshakeable is her love—is enhanced by concealing Juliet’s bedchamber behind the curtains of the inner stage, immediately opened after Romeo’s banishment (Baker, Development 71–96). As he understood it, Baker aimed to teach theater as a “total art,” to induct students into the “total development of the drama as a form” through attention to mass, color, light, and shadow, properties Baker “now knew to be as substantial stuff as plot” (qtd. in Kinne 179). In this light, Baker’s dramaturgy looks less like medium specificity than like Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, that total work of art in which all other modes find their apotheosis. “The highest conjoint work of art is the Drama,” Richard Wagner had written in 1849, explaining that drama “can only be at hand in all its possible fulness when, in it, each separate branch of art is at hand in its own utmost fulness [sic]” (184). For Wagner, whose work Baker knew and admired, that fullness had only ever existed in the amphitheaters of ancient Greece, where choral, architectural, poetic, and rhythmic artists brought forth together an “ideal expression” that managed, at the same time, to sublimate those arts “according to the momentary need of the only rule- and purpose-giver, the Dramatic Action” (33, 191). There is much of Wagner in Baker’s dramaturgy, in particular in the former’s craft-like disciplining of the expressive arts. “In the arrangement of the space for the spectators,” Wagner wrote, “the need for optic and acoustic understanding of the artwork will give the necessary law, which can only be observed by a union of beauty and fitness in the proportions” (185). This was Wagner in 1849—but this was also the work of the 47 Workshop six decades later, whose stagecraft, employed in the service of the realistic drama, could be said to be “medium specific” only insofar as its “medium” included almost every other. The organization and operation of the 47 Workshop, accordingly, reflected its commitment to theater as a total art. Indeed, later creative writing craft—with techniques focused on “structure,” “setting,” “sound,” and “movement”—should be viewed as abstractions of or formal metaphors for material practices first institutionalized in Baker’s Workshop. Workshop plays were written, in most cases, by individual playwrights in English 47, itself a workshop-style course dedicated to reading, critiquing, and revising student plays, and which met, Kinne reports, “around a large round table which soon became a symbol of the course”—and of every workshop since (90). Once Baker selected it for staging, a play would pass to set designers in the 47 Workshop proper, among whom an official competition was held to determine the overall aesthetic of the staged production; as part of this competition, designers were required to submit sketches, models with costumed figurines, and even architectural schematics for lighting and stage backgrounds. Soon after, the play would be distributed to the producer for rehearsals, its schematics to electricians, properties managers, and carpenters “to be made up out of stock,” Baker wrote, or “to be newly built” (“Constitution”). These groups represented merely a fraction, however, of what the Workshop’s “Artistic Workers”—dozens of students, alumni, Boston citizens, and drama aficionados organized into “work committees” with assignments ranging from “acting” and “shifting scenery” to “subscribing,” “prompting,” and “make-up” (Figure 3; “Constitution”). For Baker, as for later creative writing pedagogues, the collective technical standards enforced by these committees checked the playwright’s expressive ego; “in thinking that any part of the labor that goes to the making of his finished product is beneath him,” Baker wrote, “[the playwright] impairs the value of his work. The genuine artist will have learned his craft or crafts as well as his art” (“Interpretation” 15). A signet that adorned the Workshop’s programs symbolized the collaborative nature of these practices—four masked Pierrots representing author, actor, artist, and audience (“Program”). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The “work committees” of the 47 Workshop. MS Thr 639 (3642). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The “work committees” of the 47 Workshop. MS Thr 639 (3642). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Integral to the maintenance of stagecraft standards was the “workshopping” of plays for critical audiences, an effort, like SACB’s juried exhibitions, to present to the public and to Broadway managers only the most well-crafted of Harvard dramas. Beginning in 1915, archival records include extensive applications for Workshop membership, in particular statements of interest and experience in the drama as well as letters of recommendation embossed with the letterheads of Boston’s elite. These applications suggest the popularity of the 47 Workshop within those same circles that constituted the membership of SACB. “I am trying to move heaven and earth to get two tickets to the 47 Workshop play for this week,” a Mrs. Walter B. Kahn wrote Baker in 1921, “and I have been told that to achieve this stupendous result you are the only person to turn to.” With regrets, Baker declined. For those who passed muster, however, Workshop staffers kept meticulous attendance records, noting the number of complimentary tickets permitted each work committee—and the number actually used—and issuing warnings to audience members with unexcused absences or outstanding critiques. “The Executive Committee respectfully reminds you that membership in the 47 Workshop involves . . . a written criticism of every performance attended,” the standard admonishment read (Figure 4). “None has been received from you this season… Will you not cooperate?” (“Attendance”). When one audience member failed to show, he mailed a handwritten note explaining that he had suffered a flat tire on the way to the performance. “[I]t is only honest to tell you that I came to the Workshop in a shameful way,” he wrote (Figure 5). “I am afflicted with a Ford” (Illegible). Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Standardized note of warning to delinquent members of the 47 Workshop. MS Thr 639 (3657). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Standardized note of warning to delinquent members of the 47 Workshop. MS Thr 639 (3657). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide “I came to the Workshop in a shameful way—I am afflicted with a Ford.” MS Thr 639 (3680). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide “I came to the Workshop in a shameful way—I am afflicted with a Ford.” MS Thr 639 (3680). Houghton Library. Harvard University. The exchange nicely allegorizes the way craft production was threatened by an evolving industrial regime, but it also demonstrates that it was serious work to “workshop” those plays that made it on stage. Audience members were required to hand in written comments—ranging from cursory notecards to multiple-page essays—within a week of viewing any given play. While these critiques were signed “as a guarantee of good faith,” Baker frequently removed the signatures before passing them on to individual playwrights (“Baker of Harvard” C2). Workshop audiences adhered, too, to meticulous rules regarding everything from their applause to their wardrobe—“no evening dress,” Baker stipulated, no flowers across the footlights—so that even casual observers showed up, we might say, in the costumes of workers (“47 Workshop” [1921] 422–23). A century before the phrase would take off among early modern materialist scholars, Baker emphasized repeatedly that “[t]he play’s the thing,” and every aspect of the 47 Workshop was oriented, therefore, toward the optimal crafting of that thing (“47 Workshop” [1919] 187). Like the real-historical workshops preceding it, and like an American Arts and Crafts movement which hearkened back to them, the 47 Workshop was a transitional institution, adjusting liberal to utilitarian education, mediating between Harvard and Broadway, and, by fusing self-expression with fastidious stagecraft standards, preserving the craft ideal in an increasingly industrialized economy. Also like its predecessors, the 47 Workshop provided a site within which, as Richard Sennett describes, “to face or duck issues of authority and autonomy,” subordinating the artist’s work not to the authority of a master, but to a collective (54). For Sennett, medieval and preindustrial craft fostered an “engaged material consciousness,” precisely the ethos Baker’s dramaturgy cultivated in reminding students, for example, that light contained both spirit and body (120). These affinities between the 47 Workshop and its namesake are neatly suggested in the insignia printed on Workshop letterhead (Figure 6). Within the frame of a cast-iron bracket adorned with art nouveau scrollwork, a hooded medieval engraver wields a hammer and chisel. Hammer raised nearly outside the frame, the engraver holds chisel to stone, his torso swollen, bicep flexed. He is—this worker—forever anonymous, dressed in the apron of his labor. He is ready to craft. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Letterhead of the 47 Workshop. MS Thr 639 (3746). Houghton Library. Harvard University. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Letterhead of the 47 Workshop. MS Thr 639 (3746). Houghton Library. Harvard University. 2. Control 2.1 Setting the Stage: Baker and the ASME Dramatic realism proved to be the main beneficiary of Baker’s new stagecraft, but the pageant form, more than any other, had captivated Baker as an opportunity to achieve the “total development of the drama as a form.” It did so by making up in technological sophistication what it lacked, perhaps, in psychological insight. Inspiring historical pageantry to revitalize drama as a popular form distinct from commercial entertainment was the British Arts and Crafts movement under John Ruskin, a form of antimodernism tasked with relating preindustrial history through carefully choreographed spectacle. In the US, pageantry flourished between 1905 and 1925, employed not only by artistic innovators but by civic leaders, social workers, political activists, and educational reformers as a form of participatory democracy, one especially geared toward breaking down barriers of race and class and—like the Abbey Theatre and Bayreuth opera festivals—toward the promotion of civic and national identity.9Baker’s 1921 pageant depicting the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock, for example, had featured massive chorus ensembles, a parade of historical floats, and even a reconstructed Mayflower tethered in Plymouth Harbor, all lit, according to one reporter, with the “most sensitive and flexible electrical equipment that has ever been used for a dramatic performance out-of-doors.” Writing in The New Republic, Oliver Sayler lauded the pageant’s lighting technician, declaring him “that rare type, the engineer who is also [an] artist” (302). As a genre, the pageant’s total stagecraft—especially evident in Baker’s own pageantry—facilitated its characteristic integration of myth, fable, pastoral, and history in a kind of social allegory, its technical possibilities making it an important vehicle for a wide variety of early twentieth-century social reforms. It was the success of The Pilgrim Spirit—with crowds overflowing the oceanfront grandstands and 50-cent seats selling for $10 apiece—that drew the attention of ASME, which approached Baker in early 1929 to write and direct a pageant celebrating the organization’s 50th anniversary.10 Baker’s association with ASME seems strange, perhaps, given his earlier ties with SACB. Led by the era’s most prolific technical innovators, ASME consisted of precisely those “professional scientifically trained mind[s],” as its official history describes them, produced by an ever more utilitarian education system. Furthermore, like that system, ASME instilled in its members the “qualities of leadership in the processes of production, so that the engineer is often also a business man” (Hutton 10). Baker had wandered far, it may seem, from an American Arts and Crafts movement dedicated to the “intelligent man, whose ability is used as a whole, and not subdivided for commercial purposes” (SACB, Handicraft 1.1: 2). Yet if the mechanical specifications enforced by ASME—regulating everything from plumbing fixtures to power plant systems—contributed to the growing influence of the industrial “expert,” they also represented an effort to maintain technical, craft-like standards within an evolving industrial regime. That effort, undertaken alongside postbellum industrialization, had been a response to ubiquitous mechanical failures in the second half of the nineteenth century, failures particularly rampant among equipment powered by steam pressure. ASME’s “Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code,” for instance, regulating the production and maintenance of steam-pressurized equipment, was later incorporated into US law. Baker may well have recognized in the ASME an attempt to translate into an industrial context that aspect of a craft ideal that emphasized workers’ adherence to rigorous technical standards; Baker himself had long held his students to precisely those standards. Regardless of his views toward ASME, Baker relished the opportunity—and certainly the financial backing—to realize further the possibilities of dramatic form. Titled Control, his pageant was staged at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken the weekend of 5 April 1930, and tracked the development of ASME from its founding in 1880 through the present moment in mechanical engineering. In doing so, it warned against the perils of industrialization and urged the reconciliation, through craft standards, of beauty and utility. For the most elaborate production of his career, that is, Baker returned to an idea that had been his life’s work, namely, that the well-crafted drama offered a way to rethink the meaning and ramifications of labor in an industrial context, specifically by modeling, in aesthetic form, more engaged, socially responsible work. In Lears’s terminology, then, the pageant reads as “accommodationist” and oppositional at once, its ideological complexity betraying the limitations of such a framework and asking us, in place of moralistic evaluation, to hold both possibilities in mind at the same time. Control itself deftly negotiates these possibilities, making it an important, if not obvious, text in the history of American antimodernism. 2.2 Control As reported by Science in its coverage leading up to and succeeding ASME’s 50th anniversary, Control was to culminate a weekend of activities that opened with a toast from Charles Schwab at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York and concluded, three days later, at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC, no small engineering feat in its own right (“Untitled” 334–35). Demonstrating humanity’s increasing “control” over the natural environment, the pageant is composed of a series of vignettes drawn from pivotal moments in the history of mechanical engineering, from James Watt’s creation of the steam engine to George Stephenson’s floating of a railroad across Chat Moss. One vignette, detailing the invention of electric light, takes up the life of Thomas Edison at precisely the moment he manages to balance the distribution of electricity across a city block, to “control” bodily, Baker might say, the spirit of illumination. In language that might have been pulled from 47 Workshop notes, Edison explains that, while the “best incandescent lamp requires 138 foot-pounds of energy per second,” his own “new light requires but 39.6 foot-pounds,” describing luminous expression in terms of its technical standards—Edison’s, in other words, strikes one as the pedantry of grace (55). These historical vignettes, in turn, come nested within an overarching bildungsroman revolving around the figure of Control, one of four allegorical characters—the others being Conversion, Intelligence, and Imagination—whose coming of age represents broader civilizational development. It is Control, fittingly, who provides the narration linking the pageant’s multiple vignettes. Its dialogue pulled from historical records, Control thus functions as an origin story for that early twentieth-century “expert” turned out in increasing numbers by US universities, an engineer or technician who had become, as Mature Control declares near the pageant’s conclusion, “a controlling force” in American culture (49). At the same time, Mature Control makes explicit the pageant’s most prominent theme, reminding the audience of mechanical engineers that “ever with use and power Beauty comes”—by now a familiar refrain (59). As with dramatic realism, the pageant’s historical material required an approach to drama as a total art, one drawing significantly on the new stagecraft just beginning to take root in the theater. “[M]uch of the material … [illustrating] . . . the remarkable development of mechanical engineering in the past fifty years,” Baker wrote in the pageant’s typescript, “and the growing sense in such work that beauty may and must be combined with utility and power, have demanded the use of the motion picture instead of tableaux.” Moreover, as the pageant celebrated the increasing influence of the mechanical engineer, “it has seemed wiser to do without a band or orchestra, and to substitute electrical reproduction” (v). In its very form, in other words, Control celebrates the technological innovation that is its subject, incorporating film sequences, dramatic lighting effects, music from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony and Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a march of the schools with standard bearers from 26 universities, and Frank Poole Bevan’s sumptuous costume design, at once classic and futuristic (Figure 7). Mediating between Baker’s “ethical” or thesis-driven drama and “utilitarian” mass entertainment, Control is quite simply both at once, the well-crafted dramatic production. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Frank Poole Bevan’s design for the character of Conversion in Baker’s pageant Control. Reprinted with permission from the ASME. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Frank Poole Bevan’s design for the character of Conversion in Baker’s pageant Control. Reprinted with permission from the ASME. The new stagecraft employed by Baker figures most prominently in the pageant’s opening and closing scenes, multimedia tableaux bookending the development of Child Control into Mature Control and, more generally, the evolution of human civilization. Preceding its vignette-like accounts of Watt, Stephenson, and others, Control opens at the very dawn of human existence, a cinematic montage depicting great rivers, seascapes, forests, and lava flows out of which appear tool-wielding Neanderthals walking ever more upright through the mist. From behind the projection screen, a procession of Stevens Tech student actors moves across the stage, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, all bearing items such as rugs, mantles, costumes, and pottery. Important in this procession is the fact that, as humans evolve, so too do their tools, from primitive stoneware to increasingly aestheticized craft objects. The pageant’s opening sequence thus positions ASME as a natural, virtually organic, stage in human development, not as some modern force for industrialization. The illumination, soon after, of the pageant stage proper—“strong, although not extremely strong light”—represents more than a literal enlightenment (7). In the same way, the pageant’s conclusion situates films of modern dams and bridges as visual backing for a climactic paean to the potential “beauty” of industrial engineering. “Ever growing in beauty,” chant the figures of Control, Conversion, Intelligence, and Imagination—a kind of Greek chorus—after which Beauty herself emerges in a “great glow of light and color,” proclaiming herself the child of Imagination and Mature Control (60, 61). Even as the movement itself had begun to die out, then, Baker translates Arts and Crafts values into an industrial context, urging the reconciliation of beauty and utility and enacting that union in his own stagecraft. As Beauty retreats offstage, no less telling an opera than Wagner’s Siegfried fades away. Appearing via “special equipment . . . loaned by Electrical Research Products,” President Hoover delivers a closing exhortation to the pageant’s audience, the first notes of “America the Beautiful” echoing through the theater (63). The climax would look farcical today, but its most remarkable feature is how it positions the entire history of engineering as culminating in the present place and time, “America the Beautiful” being accompanied by film footage of the New York skyline shot from across the Hudson River in Hoboken. As they left the auditorium that night, Baker’s audience would have stared out at exactly that scene, viewing the city—its electrical lights, roaring subways, untold wonders of machine engineering—as an inheritance toward which all human history had been tending (61). It is a triumph of the “total work of art” that, as its audience members exit, they also enter, finding the artwork itself suddenly turned inside out. Yet the pageant’s evolutionary arc, as Baker treats it, is not ultimately a natural or foreordained trajectory; rather, the present moment of industrial dominance has been midwifed by those educational institutions through which its beneficiaries have passed. “Come now the Schools,” declares Control halfway through the pageant. “Come the Departments!” (41). And, on cue, standard-bearers from 26 universities—from MIT to the University of California—parade down the aisles in a fourth-wall shattering “March of the Schools” (x). Just as Baker used the 47 Workshop as a means of elevating public taste in the drama, Control represents higher education as critical, too, in raising an industrial regime above mere utilitarianism. Like The Pilgrim Spirit before it, Control is a fascinating example of the historical pageant, a genre critically underrecognized despite its importance as a mixed-media phenomenon in the early twentieth century. While The Pilgrim Spirit dutifully participated in the genre’s project of buttressing national identity, Control was less sanguine about that project, at least insofar as US identity was defined by mass production and, more acutely, the commercialism of the Broadway drama. Craft rhetoric and practice was key to Baker’s challenge of that commercialism, as it was to his critique of the wider industrial regime lying behind it. Though craft production itself had become a moribund proposition, Baker’s work in the pageant form and the 47 Workshop helped to institutionalize craft as an aesthetic practice, ironically laying the foundation for that other soon-to-explode mass industry—the MFA. 3. Coda: The MFA 3.1 Craft, Inc. My genealogy for creative writing, as I’ve suggested, has implicitly questioned standard origin stories for the discipline, particularly McGurl’s contention that creative writing begins as an aspect of progressive education. Committed to the values of individuality and self-expression, the Progressive movement, in McGurl’s narrative, was facilitated institutionally by the development of an elective system that emphasized “the student’s interest in his studies and the diversity of those interests (and abilities) from student to student” (94). As creative writing, around midcentury, entered graduate institutions dominated by the New Criticism, self-expression became a concern secondary to “the classically modernist value of ‘impersonality,’” an aesthetic formalism achieved, McGurl holds, through the “disciplin[e]” of creative writing craft. The result was a creative mode that McGurl, somewhat archly, calls “programmatic self-expression” (23, 11). McGurl’s narrative is a compelling one, not least for its attention to how postwar aesthetic formations—like Flannery O’Connor’s rigorously impersonal short stories—formally encode the “program” within which they were produced. Still, this essay has challenged that narrative at several points. First, the elective system developed at Harvard—where the first workshop came to fruition and where other forms of creative writing had been taught in advanced composition courses since 1880—was more vocational training, a means of adapting higher education to the needs of an industrializing nation, and less an instrument for self-expression.11 Second, before midcentury creative writing programs institutionalized “programmatic self-expression,” that mode characterized an ideal of aesthetic production upheld by the American Arts and Crafts movement, for whom proper craftsmanship adhered to rigorously programmatic standards while also encouraging engaged, even expressive, labor. That creative writing’s most prestigious graduate programs ascended contemporaneously with the New Critics’ rise to power—and that such programs were in some prominent cases organized around New Critical principles—has screened from hindsight the earlier origin of “workshop” in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Returning to that origin, however—and, in so doing, recovering the continuity of postwar and contemporary creative writing with early twentieth-century craft—helps us better understand how our own institutional practices have been structured by and continuously restructure transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. While playwriting has set up shop outside of standard creative writing curricula (with rare exceptions), the theory and practice of craft remain central to contemporary creative writing. Specifically, craft constitutes a pedagogical “adjustment” allowing as expressive of an art as poetry, for example, to be taught in the first place—allowing it, that is, to be packaged for, purchased by, and distributed to generation after generation of eager educational consumers (McGurl 93).12 For if its encouragement of students’ self-expression separates creative writing from departmental neighbors—namely, composition and literature—the discipline’s invocation of craft helps frame it as equally rigorous as the classification of rhetorical topoi or the materialist exegesis of Ulysses (1922), a crucial purveyor, advocates claim, of those skills necessary to a rising professional-managerial class. At the same time, their induction into and eventual mastery of craft legitimates students as professionals, separating them, as in the guilds and workshops of old, from Sunday painters and county-laureate poets. In an era like our own, of escalated credentialing and contracting arts economies, craft constitutes one line of force, therefore, in what Pierre Bourdieu has called a struggle “to impose the dominant definition of the writer,” effectively delimiting, moreover, the population of writers licensed to take part in that struggle (The Field 42). Thus, creative writing craft—which began, for Baker, as a way of disrupting the cultural and material reproduction of the ruling class—functions today to consolidate the authority of elite educational institutions, those increasingly corporatized and market-oriented “multiversit[ies],” as Clark Kerr termed them more than 50 years ago, “held together by administrative rules and powered by money” (15). Craft—in the modern university as elsewhere—exists primarily as a commodity. The “workshopped” poem or short story shares discursive space with a veritable trove of luxury and aesthetic consumer products requiring, for their enjoyment, both economic and cultural capital. From Yeti coolers to “hand-loomed” Pottery Barn rugs to “craft” IPAs and “small-batch” bourbons, craft has been packaged into a haute “lifestyle” proposition characterized by what Bourdieu calls the “barbarous reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption” (Distinction 6). Such reintegration may signal, of course, late realization of the American Arts and Crafts movement’s pedagogical mission. Alternatively, the institutionalization or incorporation of craft might mark precisely the accommodationism Lears so derides. I am, however, less interested in a morality tale of contemporary craft than in understanding how and to what ends craft has been deployed within creative writing, where each semester it is disseminated, among other forms, in the ubiquitous, perennially “revised and updated” craft book. 3.2 “Invest the Feeling in Words”: The Craft Book Like books of trade popularized among seventeenth-century craftsmen, craft books disclose the mysteries and strategies of the professional, separating creative writing into constitutive “craft” elements—many of which, like “structure” and “setting,” metaphorize material stagecraft practices—and inducting readers into the closed guild of the graduate workshop. I close by drawing attention to one text that succinctly allegorizes the university’s role in transforming the nature and meaning of craft. In his 1979 craft book The Triggering Town—still, perhaps, the most widely used craft book among contemporary poets—Richard Hugo charges student-writers to take “immediate emotional possession” of deindustrialized mill towns as a kind of imaginative spur, tasking students with creatively refashioning those towns to suit poetic imperative. “If you have no emotional investment in the town,” Hugo writes, “though you have taken immediate emotional possession of it for the duration of the poem, it may be easier to invest the feeling in the words” (13). Though he elsewhere figures creative writing as “hard work,” Hugo’s financial rhetoric frames the writer as expropriative collections agent or multinational CEO, cannily shifting investment opportunities in order to streamline production and maximize profit (17). Toward this end, Hugo points to the role of the postwar university in promoting white-collar or professional-managerial labor over and against the kinds of industrialism that once dominated the US economy, including Hugo’s own “triggering town.” Yet Hugo is hardly unalive to the implications of his metaphors. Defending the teaching of creative writing within the research-driven university, he contends that “creative writing belongs in the university for the same reason other subjects do: because people will pay to study them.” “It’s nice,” Hugo avers, “to be on the payroll again” (54). The critique, then, that the contemporary MFA industry privileges professionalization over aesthetic mastery—or “career over craft,” as Lisa Jarnot puts it—misses how craft itself has been deployed as a finishing tool for aspiring writers (181). At the same time, I want to resist any easy nostalgia for naïve or prelapsarian craftsmanship. Though the American Arts and Crafts Movement, including Baker’s 47 Workshop, constituted meaningful opposition to an evolving industrial regime, craft has existed—at least since William Morris—in dialogic relationship with, not as the antithesis of, industrial production. Neither Lears’s crisp binaries nor Jarnot’s ready ethical distinctions attend fully to the implication of craft with broader economic processes. Nor, finally, does the incorporation of craft into the modern university signal the inevitable entrenchment of the “McPoem” or “workshop lyric,” as the most common critique of the MFA holds.13 Rather, such an alignment opens discursive and material space for a post-Romantic poetics characterized not by its aesthetic autonomy, but by self-reflexive attention to its institutional being, to those values and discourses—including craft—that structure poetry as a commodity and fetish. “I eat lunch with J. Hillis Miller,” Hugo gushes, “brilliant and nice / as they come, in the faculty club, overlooking the lake, / much of it now filled in” (Making 276). As the name-drop suggests, the twenty-first-century workshop poem deconstructs its own craftedness. where he is completing a dissertation on twentieth-century labor poetics. His scholarly writing also appears in Modernism/modernity and is forthcoming from English Literary History (ELH). Footnotes 1 " I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of Houghton Library at Harvard University, especially Dale Stinchcomb, for their assistance in accessing the George Pierce Baker Papers. 2 " For more on what she calls Baker’s “revised contract” with American theater audiences, see Dorothy Chansky, “The 47 Workshop and the 48 States: George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre Audience,” Theatre History Studies, vol. 18, 1998, pp. 135–46. 3 " My discussion of workshop as a “laboring force in US culture” echoes Laura Rigal’s contention that American labor emerged as “the artifact of myriad representational structures,” what she calls the “cultural production of production” (8). See Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (1998), especially pp. 8–25. 4 " For detailed discussion of the history of the American Arts and Crafts movement in Boston, see Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (2010). For more on SACB as an exercise in cultural capital, see especially Edward S. Cooke Jr., “Talking or Working: The Conundrum of Moral Aesthetics in Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement,” Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Craft Movement (1997), edited by Marilee Boyd Meyer, pp. 19–24. 5 " See Denman Ross, “The Arts and Crafts: A Diagnosis,” Handicraft, vol. 1, no. 1, Apr. 1902–Mar. 1903, pp. 229–43. For more on SACB’s Handicraft Shop, see Beverly K. Brandt, The Craftsman and the Critic: Defining Usefulness and Beauty in Arts and Crafts-Era Boston (2009), especially pp. 126–28. 6 " See George Pierce Baker, “Untitled lighting plan,” unpublished, ca. 1915, George Pierce Baker Papers, MS Thr 639 (3647), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 7 " While I read the 47 Workshop as integrating “beauty” and “utility” in the context of Eliot’s administrative reforms, Mark Hodin reads it as mediating between the “‘practical’ orientation of his rhetoric classes and the ‘humanistic’ emphasis of his Shakespeare scholarship.” See Mark Hodin, “‘It Did Not Sound Like a Professor’s Speech’: George Pierce Baker and the Market for Academic Rhetoric,” Theatre Survey, vol. 46, no. 2, 2005, pp. 225–46. 8 " See C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume 1, 1900–1940 (1982), especially pp. 1–9; Thomas Fahy, Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos (2011), especially pp. 1–15; and Jordan Y. Miller and Winifred L. Frazer, American Drama Between the Wars: A Critical History (1991), especially pp. 1–2. 9 " For more on the relation between pageantry and the Arts and Crafts movement, see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990). For excellent discussion of the civic and educational uses of pageantry see Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy (1990). 10 " See A. J. Philpott, “Final Performance of Pilgrim Pageant,” Boston Daily Globe, 14 Aug. 1921, p. 10. 11 " On advanced composition at Harvard, an alternative origin story for creative writing, see Katherine H. Adams, A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges (1993), especially pp. 16–60. For another history of creative writing, one crucial to McGurl’s account, see D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (2006). 12 " See Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004). 13 " For contemporary objections to the “McPoem” and “workshop lyric,” see David Dooley, “The Contemporary Workshop Aesthetic,” The Hudson Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 1990, pp. 259–80, especially p. 260; and Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982–88 (1988). Works Cited “Account of expenses of Lina Amuses Herself.” George Pierce Baker Papers, MS Thr 639 (3635), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Adams Katherine. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges: Years of Acceptance, Growth, and Doubt . Southern Methodist U , 1993 . 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TI - The Play’s a Thing: The 47 Workshop and the “Crafting” of Creative Writing
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajaa002
DA - 2020-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-play-s-a-thing-the-47-workshop-and-the-crafting-of-creative-5HlvlcHNDm
SP - 243
VL - 32
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -