> Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled, Dostoevsky had a degree in engineering. Joyce did major in literature, but even he entered medical school (before leaving), and also failed multiple classes in his undergraduate days. Not one of these great writers would now be accepted to any MFA in the country.
I'm not sure what the modern equivalent would be, but clearly doing the usual round of agents etc wouldn't be it.
Joyce got almost nowhere until he was promoted by Ezra Pound, who was a Significant Figure on the literary scene.
I don't know about Faulkner, but Dostoevsky also came from a scene and - after some really bad times - made an impression when Crime and Punishment was serialised in a magazine.
So I don't think the MFA issue is the problem. The issue is more that literary scenes don't really exist any more, in the sense of groups of people who all know each other and have common values.
The 2022 publisher pipeline is very much just a content creation business with no higher aspirations. The gatekeeping steps - MFAs included - mostly exist to extract cash from the hopeful, not to curate quality.
> On average, these MFA programs are sending a generation of aspiring artists into debt for often zero financial return. Before MFAs, starving artists simply didn’t have any money. Now, starving artists have massive debt.
But that's not true of the other gatekeepers? Publishers make money if books sell. Ditto agents. Blurb writers work for free (in general). If they don't curate quality, they certainly think they do.
This is a very good point. It's especially striking in visual arts; we used to have groups of more or less young people obsessed with certain ideas and aesthetics. They would meet up in old Parisian flats, write manifestos and plot against their rivals. Nowadays it's all about individual genius. I'm not making a judgement here-- it simply seems we've lost a sense of community attached to this (which certainly relates to the broader social fabric too).
I guess you could say furries are an art movement in this regard. Though they meet up sometimes (I guess), when they do it's not really the same thing. They communicate through a Discord server; it's no longer a public forum, it has become an echo chamber.