At Deutsche Welle Krisha Kops looks at the insidious spread of 'MFA'-type writing programmes in Germany, reporting that misguided Young German authors ditch muse for school.
Kops (whose Twitter-handle is, unreassuringly, @harekrisha) admits to jumping on the bandwagon -- he's enrolled at the Bavarian Academy of Writing -- but does note that they have largely been able to keep the plague at bay:
At least there's also a good quote re. writing in translation in the UK, director of the creative writing programme at UEA, Andrew Cowan, acknowledging:
Kops (whose Twitter-handle is, unreassuringly, @harekrisha) admits to jumping on the bandwagon -- he's enrolled at the Bavarian Academy of Writing -- but does note that they have largely been able to keep the plague at bay:
Here, in the country of poets and thinkers, the idea that top-class writing can be developed is slow to catch on.He compares the situation to the US and UK ("Universities in Anglo-Saxon countries tend to be more progressive than their German counterparts when it comes to integrating non-traditional fields of study") -- and tries to sell readers on why this sort of nonsense might be a good thing. (Yeah, okay, I'll grant that MFA-trained US/UK: "writers are 'more polished' because of their writing training" -- but rarely is it the kind of polish I'm looking for or drawn to (or, indeed, even find bearable). This is, of course, also a personal/style bias -- I can't stand the approach of the vast majority of journalism-school trained 'news'-writing (which seems to me to be anything but) that currently prevails in the US either.)
At least there's also a good quote re. writing in translation in the UK, director of the creative writing programme at UEA, Andrew Cowan, acknowledging:
"British publishing is extremely parochial and nervous of the public's receptiveness to writing in translation," he points out.I'm not sure the polished prose of German MFA-graduates is going to do anything to change that.