MFA aspirants seek therapeutic self-permission rather than literary fame

Evidence

In each case, what strikes me aren’t the particulars—age, attitude, ambitions—so much as their essential motive. What they really want isn’t fame or fortune but permission to articulate feelings that were somehow off limits within the fragile habitat of their families. They are hoping to find, by means of literary art, braver and more-forgiving versions of themselves. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Bears on the reader’s defense of mediation: if writing-as-therapy is what drives the expressive turn, that weakens the case that immediacy is politically progressive.
• SEED: Angle: the contemporary workshop, via Kornbluh, recapitulates the Romantic-confession frame while claiming self-expression is radical — a genealogy piece.