Professions of Craft: Program Era Pedagogy in Julia Alvarez's ¡Yo!

Abstract

Abstract:This article expands and complicates existing accounts of Program Era Latinx fiction by centering the career of Julia Alvarez, an author whose strategic acts of affiliation with the creative writing program diverge from the critical stances articulated by other popular Latinx writers. Alvarez, I argue, frequently deployed the vocabulary of the MFA to negotiate her literary reception amid her marketplace success in the 1990s. Her strategic appeals to discourses of the university redirected the exoticizing and commodifying attentions of the US literary market, soliciting more formalist engagement with her work. Alvarez's writing during this period, particularly her novel ¡Yo! (1997), theorizes creative writing pedagogy in dialogue with multicultural politics, exploring the social applications and limitations of MFA curriculum.