In the introduction to The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s 2010 work of memoir-cum-literary criticism, she describes having to decide, on graduation, between a fiction-writing fellowship at an artists’ colony and the PhD programme in comparative literature at Stanford University. Batuman wants to be a writer, not an academic. The decision ought to be straightforward.
But when she visits the artists’ colony, she finds its culture depressingly sterile: “All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words’.” Worse still is the tendency she finds in creative writing culture to glory in ignorance of the literary tradition, or of specialised study of any kind. Batuman wants to write – and read – literature that is about literature, as well as about life. She chooses Stanford.
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