The Elephants Teach - by David Gershom Myers (Paperback)

About the Book

This book traces the development of "creative" writing as a classroom subject, the teaching of fiction- and verse-writing; and as a national system for the employment of fiction writers and poets to teach the subject. It answers the questions, "Why has fiction and verse writing come to be called creative?" and "When and why was this term first used?"

Book Synopsis

When Vladimir Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: "What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?" That anecdote, with which D. G. Myers begins The Elephants Teach, perfectly frames the issues this book tackles.

Myers explores more than a century of debate over how writing should be taught and whether it can or should be taught in a classroom at all. Along the way, he incorporates insights from a host of poets and teachers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, John Berryman, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Saul Bellow. And from his exhaustive research, Myers extracts relevant background information on nineteenth-century educational theory; shifts in technology, publishing, and marketing; the growth of critical theory in this country; and the politics of higher education. While he shows how creative writing has become a machine for creating more creative writing programs, Myers also suggests that its history supplies a precedent for something different--a way for creativity and criticism, poetry and scholarship, to join together to produce not just writing programs but good writers.

Updated with fresh commentary on what's happened to creative writing in the academy since the first edition was published ten years ago, The Elephants Teach will be indispensable for students and teachers of writing, literature, and literary history.

From the Back Cover

The Elephants Teach is a captivating account of how creative writing has become an integral part of our culture since the last decades of the nineteenth century. A story of the American will-to-art, it also offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the development of English as a field of study. D.G. Myers argues that English has been split into three rival and antagonist fields: composition, literary scholarship, and the constructive art of literature, which includes both creative writing and literary criticism. He traces this split from the earliest days of the discipline, when it was called philology, through the rise of English composition and the critical wars of the thirties, down to the present. Along the way, he tells how poets and writers turned to university teaching as a means of economic support, restoring a neglected chapter in the history of American authorship and literary education.

Review Quotes

"This material I think should be required for anyone who intends to teach creative writing on the college or university level."--Patrick Bizzaro "College Composition and Communication"

"In clear prose and careful scholarship, David Myers . . . tells the story of how what was supposed to free English literature from the trap of academic disciplines became itself an academic discipline."First Things>

-- "First Things"

"Myers is thorough, his writing is clear, and the history he has to tell will be to most, if not all, current teachers of creative writing little short of a revelation. . . . This is a book all teachers of creative writing should read."History of Education Quarterly>

--Roger Mitchell "History of Education Quarterly"

"The Elephants Teach is an astonishing piece of work. . . . Under the author's magic it becomes the story of a great part of our culture since the turn of the century." - from the Foreword by Jacques Barzun

--from the Foreword by Jacques Barzun

About the Author

D. G. Myers is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. He is coeditor of the anthology Unrelenting Readers: The New Poet-Critics.