Richard Kostelanetz

• Home
• Histories
• Inventories
• Proposals
• Examples
• Links

Excerpts from The Grants-Fix (to 1981): A Critical Examination of Publicly Funded Literary Granting in the United States

Dedicated to the memory of SINCLAIR LEWIS:
My First Literary Hero

The state may be incompetent at producing art, but it need not be incompetent at creating social arrangements that foster art. ... Intelligent and imaginative men can devise intelligent and imaginative government policies to help cultivate the arts. The fact that nearly every civilized nation in the world does make grants to the arts—and that artists are not anywhere in revolt against the system of state subsidy as such—would dispose of this myth once and for all....

—Alvin Toffler, The Culture Consumers (1965)

I am convinced that we are going to have the greatest literary experience and explosion that this country has ever had; I think there are more people writing today and there are more people writing good stuff than ever before in the history of this country. Part of the reason for his is...that, for the first time in the history of this country, poets specifically are being allowed to identify themselves as poets in their own communities, and this is happening all over the country, primarily because of the program called Poets-in-the-Schools, which puts published writers, both poets and fiction writers, into classrooms at the elementary and secondary levels, and they are identified as poets, not as writers,...but as poets.

—Leonard Randolph, in a symposium at Johns Hopkins University (1975)

The Ford Foundation...is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some.

—Dwight Macdonald, The Ford Foundation (1956)

One dimension of the new journalism is those individual writers...whose choice of language, structure, and subject break new ground. They have successfully appropriated the forms and techniques of the short story to enrich and expand the more immediate genre of journalism. They have exploded the old, impersonal, objective journalism school formulas to get closer to the human core of reality, to tell more of how it really is after the press agents and ghostwriters go home, to be more than “clerks of fact.” They use symbols, imagery, and imaginative language and structure. They set a mood, and experiment with character development, and try wild stabs of intuitive insight. They have a point of view, and they are personally involved in whatever they are writing about.

And most distinctively, the new journalism challenges the central myth of objectivity. The new journalist does not call the anonymous source or the official expert for a quote. He does not try to speak for an institution, only for his own conscience. He does not take into account “the national interest,” but only what he sees and thinks.

Participation and advocacy remain the touchstones of the new insurgent journalism. The evidence now seems overwhelming that the closer a serious writer gets, the more he is there to record those decisive moments of spontaneity and authenticity. He gets inside the context and sees scenes and details that distance and neutrality deny to the more conventional reporters.

—Jack Newfield, “Journalism: Old, New, and Corporate” (1969)

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. ... I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

—George Orwell, “Why I Write” (1946)