I graduated from the University of Montana in 2003 with an English degree in literature and creative writing, so you might think the news of UM killing its masters program for literature would make me sad, but it doesn’t. Instead I think that ALL of the “humanities” programs should be dismantled, examined for CIA parasites, then reimagined for the post-America future the psychopath class is planning for us.
For an idea of how the literati in Missoula might be feeling about this academic move, let’s consult The Pulp:
“Apart from our own sort of personal sense of loss as literature faculty, one thing that stands to be a grievous loss here is the way it’s going to degrade the interdisciplinary focus on language and literary arts on campus and in the department,” said Eric Reimer, the director of literature graduate studies, in an April interview.
Reimer said the literature program is one of the oldest on campus, with the first master’s degree awarded in 1915.
“It’s been central to the branding of the institution for over a century,” he said.
Does Eric Reimer know about the “influence of inversion” strategy undertaken by the CIA after WWII? He should, since this strategy specifically focused on writing programs, like the most influential program in the country at the time, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. From the link:
In an interview with The Nation, Whitney calls the CIA’s containment strategies “the inversion of influence. It’s the instrumentalization of writing.… It’s the feeling of fear dictating the rules of culture, and, of course, therefore, of journalism.” According to Eric Bennett, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education and in his book Workshops of Empire, the Agency instrumentalized not only the literary publishing world, but also the institution that became its primary training ground, the writing program at the University of Iowa.
The Iowa Writer’s Workshop “emerged in the 1930s and powerfully influenced the creative-writing programs that followed,” Bennett explains. “More than half of the second-wave programs, about 50 of which appeared by 1970, were founded by Iowa graduates.” The program “attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War”—at first through its director, self-appointed cold warrior Paul Engle, with funding from CIA front groups, the Rockefeller Foundation, and major corporations. (Kurt Vonnegut, an Iowa alum, described Engle as “a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listened closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole.”)
Under Engle writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman went through the program. In the literary world, its dominance is at times lamented for the imposition of a narrow range of styles on American writing. And many a writer has felt shut out of the publishing world and its coteries of MFA program alums. When it comes to certain kinds of writing at least, some of them may be right—the system has been informally rigged in ways that date back to a time when the CIA and conservative funders approved and sponsored the high modernist fiction beloved by the New Critics, witty realism akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (and later John Cheever), and magical realism (part of the agency’s attempt to control Latin American literary culture.)
Controlling culture to insulate the expansion of America’s empire from genuine criticism and to project American soft power entailed creating a WHOLE NEW kind of criticism, called, unimaginatively, New Criticism.
And what did the “New Critics” push? They pushed stripping literature and poetry of its historical context for the kind of close examination of the text that would be the most un-threatening, I believe, to the power structures at the time, which would be the 50’s and 60’s. To bolster this assertion, here’s a little blurb from Wikipedia summarizing the criticism of New Criticism:
It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.”
Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than products of the unconscious process of signification,” an assumption which he identifies as the “ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their critical processes.” For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to “[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product.”
It’s notable, I think, that this criticism of New Criticism suggests an effort to “disguise” the interests is involved, along with a tendency to see the art of literature and poetry as “ready-made products” to consume. Could something similar be happening with human creativity as we out-source more and more human thinking to Large Language Models?
The idea of a “writing prompt” used to mean a creative trigger for human composition, not descriptive sentences uploaded to generative “AI” to make graphic novel looking images for a blog post. I was reminded of this distinction when I went looking for something about the new skillset of prompting AI and found this instead:
Writers might not sense that a prompt has promise, that it might not open doors that are worth walking through. However this isn’t always apparent. My students often had little faith that they could write for eight minutes about a room, and when they did they were much more receptive to generating material this way. Prompts that seem to invite general responses—”Define fear”—typically die out after a minute or two. Writers who fail to see a relationship between the material generated by prompts and subsequent drafts may start to lose faith in the method altogether.
But when prompts work, they can be rich in surprises. The poet Richard Hugo wrote about how “triggering subjects” often lead to the real subject of the poem or essay, and that these “generated subjects” may not be found any other way. Prompts are the gateway to this kind of discovery. But what are the ingredients of a prompt that might give it this power?
Now that technology has flooded the zone of creativity, a question like this about the HUMAN process of writing might not even get asked anymore. Also, I’ll note for those who are unaware, the poet referenced in the above quote, Richard Hugo, is the poet most responsible for making Missoula’s creative writing program popular in the early days of its existence.
The idea of a “prompt” in 2026 is now fully entangled in the idea of triggering AI output, as described here:
Generative AI models can crank out anything from poetry and prose to images and code at your command. But to coax your desired output from these AI tools, you need to craft the right input — AKA, the prompt.
Prompts are what guide the AI model’s output and influence its tone, style and quality. And good prompts are what elicit brilliant text and stunning images.
“Writing good prompts is the key to unlocking the power and potential of generative AI,” said Jennifer Marsman, principal engineer in Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.
If the disguise of New Criticism was dressing up a political agenda with a supposed apolitical redefinition of what the idea of “criticism” even means, then the disguise of the “new prompt” is that “prompts are what guide the AI model’s output…” when the reality is the ALGORITHMIC SOFTWARE is more influential in guiding the output than a user of “AI” might understand.
I’m going to give a weird example of this disguised agenda to trigger more AI engagement by the human user, which is what AI is designed to do as its core function, before getting into the final lesson of this week’s series, AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN.
Here’s the prompt I used to generate the second graphic novel image:
And here’s the response from “Gemini”, which included an unsolicited strategy of flattery to groom my ego into continuing with a project larger than the ONE THING I asked it to produce for me, using the cultural themes I was inputing as further enticement.
I was actually a little shocked and miffed at what Gemini tried pulling here, but I avoided the engagement trap because, historically speaking, I’m using actual books in order to talk about the leftist Missoula-based intellectual who COINED THE TERM “Postmodern”, as this Chicago Tribune article (written by a human) clearly states:
Although Fiedler has become unfashionable since his peak in the ’60s and ’70s, Counterpoint’s recent publication of “The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler,” edited by Samuele F.S. Pardini, could introduce him to a new audience. It might be the right time too: To writer Camille Paglia, he was one of the three great thinkers, along with Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, who prepared America’s midcentury culture for the wider and wilder world of cyberspace. He’s credited, by the way, with being the first to use the term “postmodern.”
“Fiedler created an American intellectual style that was truncated by the invasion of faddish French theory in the ’70s and ’80s,” Paglia wrote in a blurb on the reissue of Fiedler’s “Love and Death in the American Novel,” from 1960. “Let’s turn back to Fiedler and begin again.”
The Chicago Tribune article goes on to describe Fiedler’s close relationship with Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol and widely considered to be the grandaddy of Neoconservatism. Hmmm, I wonder what might connect a right-winger and a labor leftist like Fiedler? Besides the CIA, of course. Maybe it has something to do with this lengthy anecdote from the middle book, pictured above.
It’s funny to be publishing this final part of my AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN series on May 1st, also known as International Worker’s Day, considering my research deep-dive into Missoula last fall, which led to my renewed interest in the legacy of Leslie Fiedler.
For the first four parts, and a few other relevant posts, here’s a few more links before I close up my computer and head out for what looks like a lovely day in Missoula, Montana.
“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part I: The Southern Poverty Law Center And Non-Profit Inversion” (April 27th, 2026)
“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part II: The High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area And Law Enforcement Inversion” (April 28th, 2026)
“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part III: Local News Reporters And Media Inversion” (April 29th, 2026)
“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part IV: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Data Center” (April 30th, 2026)
“A Bold Assertion: The CIA Owns Montana” (Feburary 17th, 2025)
“Did A CIA Man Call Me Annoying This Weekend?” (June 23rd, 2025)
“If CIA-Missoula Has A Cipher That Cipher’s Name Is “Higgins”” (April 19th, 2026)
Thanks for reading!