Seven
Decades of Innovation
Situated
in New York City's Greenwich Village, The New
School has been a vital center for writing and the instruction of writing since
1931 when Gorham Munson, a Manhattan
editor and influential partisan of the Alfred Stieglitz circle, introduced his
now-legendary workshop in creative writing.
"We
can't claim a first," Munson subsequently recalled. "Credit for the
first goes to Amherst
for inviting Robert Frost to be a poet-in-residence. But when The New School began
to offer writing courses, the professional writer was a rare animal on the
classroom platform. We led the way in revolutionizing the teaching of writing.
For notice that all of us in those years were practicing writers. We washed the
typewriter ink off our hands as we started for class." These early,
experimental workshops proved so decisive for the study of writing in America
that soon the Saturday Review of Literature celebrated the "truly
wonderful prodigality of talent" issuing from The New School, and cited
the complement of "gifted teachers" at the expanded New School
Writing Center. Critic Maxwell Geismar eventually observed in The Nation that The New School has
become the richest center of new fiction among all our colleges and
universities.
The
New School Writing Program is an opportunity to study the craft of writing
under the direction of master teachers who are themselves distinguished
practitioners. The approach emphasizes the study of literature as a vital
artistic discipline, a creative activity, rather than as a field for historical
analysis or an object for interpretation, as in English or Comparative Literature
Departments. In seminars and workshops,
writing teachers who operate in The New School practitioner tradition tend to
approach works of art from the inside out, moving inevitably from a close
alertness to language, craft, and form into history and culture, engaging
ambitiously the full complexity of a work, and striving to resist any critical
narrowness, insularity, and reduction.
The
tradition of experienced writers reflecting on their own practices and
disciplines offers a uniquely powerful vantage for the study of literature of
the past, since for writers, learning or tracking their art, the past is
inescapably the present. Think of W.G. Sebald discovering how to
write The Rings of Saturn (1999) by
reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Supulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658) or young Elizabeth Bishop creating her early poems under the spectral
tutelage of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The
practitioner tradition is inherently multidisciplinary – drawing for energy and
knowledge on other arts; or crossing literary genres.