McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest in American writing, the rise of the creative writing program [in higher education] has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O'Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison.--From book jacket.