Hilarious quote from this Slate article (also discussed at about 15:00 in the Slate Culture Gabfest for 12/1/10):
A criticism about the advent of the “fiction writing” degree, MFA:
The whole discipline had been gestating for a decade, beginning with novelist Walter Besant musing in 1884 over the notion of “Professors of Fiction”—something then as fantastical as a steam-powered robot. It was a vision that at least one critic found “Appalling. As if there were not enough novels already. … [Now] we are to have our young maidens trained to the business, and let loose upon the world, in batches, every year to pursue their devastating calling, as if they were dentists or pharmaceutical chemists.”
