The Elephants
Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. D. G. Myers. Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 240. $17.00, paper. ISBN: 0-226-55454-6.
TEL: 773-702-7490 • FAX: 773-702-9756
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 of this book was published 10 years
ago, it carries a foreword by Jacques Barzun.
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