The novels by the American Slavicist and writer Elif Batuman contain what is probably the most precise documentation of Harvard University’s creative writing program that is currently available in terms of the history of ideas. From these books we know, among other things, that in the 1910s it was still taught there that it was “childish, egotistical, inartistic and despicable” to write about “how one experienced one’s own life”. Writing about something you’ve already thought about isn’t literature, it’s navel-gazing, and in order to learn how to create characters different from yourself, Harvard students were asked to fill out questionnaires about those characters’ characteristics. Batuman’s first-person narrator fills in the fields for “favorite food” and “favorite color” with “tacos” and “beige” and is otherwise somewhat desperate.
Days of German Literature: Bachmann Prize for Valeria Gordeev – Culture
