Why “Writing & the Human Condition”? Why now?

There are over 300 master’s-level writing programs in the United States. For comparison, there are 214 medical schools and only 198 accredited law schools. If we can use the same imposing, urgent word—“need”—for institutions that form public defenders and attorneys general and pediatric oncologists and brain surgeons as those that give us memoirists, novelists, and poets, it would seem the “need” for writing education has been more than sufficiently met. 

But obviously indispensable as doctors and lawyers may be, how we can keep our heart pumping and our hands off of each other must eventually yield to the much more intractable question of why we should. A human being does not live on bread (or anti-depressants or well-structured indemnities) alone. We need reasons, or at least, some consolations, that recommend our ceaseless toiling. For several thousand years, the pleasures of the written word have been among those few things that can make life worth living. And yet, despite the fact that there is more formal writing instruction available than at any other time in human history, no one could plausibly claim that we are now enjoying a golden age of letters. 

Any number of culprits (historical, cultural, technological) could be blamed for the aridness of this moment, but the current legion of writing programs deserves special scrutiny. Under their influence an identifiable style has developed—polished, literate, urbane, and introspective, but bored, boring, exhausted, and exhausting. It has the stale air of our post-post-modern time, where everything has been done and said and decided. If writing is to mean anything to the broader culture again, writers need to recover something of the awe of this life and its characters that once inspired the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare and the Russian novelists and every other author of an immortal work. 

The problem with traditional writing programs, focused as they are solely on craft and technique, is that they neglect the sine qua non of good writing. To say something well you must first have something to say. As Emil Cioran observed, writing is the least ascetic activity, i.e., the most self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing activity. The writer demands something of his reader that even the vapid actor and the vacuous influencer do not, something more than mere attention or engagement, namely, effort. On any given page, a reader must translate thousands of monochromatic symbols into images and concepts and events and feelings—a whole coherent, intelligible edifice. That considerable exertion will feel poorly repaid if it has not disclosed a genuinely novel insight, or at least a truth that has been forgotten or remained only half understood and, for whatever reason, unilluminated by the clarity of articulation. Readers want, and deserve, a reward.

The Writing & the Human Condition program at the Woods College of Advancing Studies was created on the neglected truism that all great writers are first and foremost great psychologists. That is why we celebrate them. That is why we tolerate them. They see deeply into life, and most especially the human psyche, and they show us what we could not otherwise see and what we could not otherwise endure. They are distinguished for their steady, acute eye as much as their pen. Our program is the first to train its students for this type of vision.