Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
When I use the term the American MFA industry, I am referring to the multimillion-dollar conglomeration of state and private enterprises within the neoliberal language industry that has developed in continuum with the crisis of global capitalism over the past four decades. During this time, the American MFA industry has expanded into a vast network of loosely interconnected programs (housed at universities and colleges), creative writing faculties, journals (many produced by pro bono labor of student workers), graduate students, and pools of potential applicants. Constituent industries (the Modem Language Association-MLA, the Associated Writing Programs-AWP, Poets & Writers Magazine, the series of annual Writer's Market directories, etc.) sustain, in part, the system's reproduction. Publishing houses (large- and small press, for profit and not-for-profit), bookstores and book distributors (corporate, independent, and on-line), journals (academically affiliated and non-affiliated), writer's retreats, contests, and grants also maintain the industry's reproduction and expansion.
Repository Citation
Nowak, Mark. "Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 1–12. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss3/6
Comments
This article was reprinted from ¡Workers of the Word: Unite and Fight! Palm Press, 2005. www.palmpress.org/chapbooks.html