Streamlining the muse: Creative agency and the reconfiguration of charismatic education as professional training in israeli poetry writing workshops

In this article I seek to theorize recent institutional transformations of creative agency that involve the increasing embeddedness of art socialization in the professional and bureaucratic infrastructure of various sorts of educational organizations in the contemporary West. I argue that institutional art education involves the reconfiguration of charismatic education as professional training, and I suggest that this provides an opportunity to theorize the features shared between charismatic education and professional training against the backdrop of a research tradition that has viewed them as antithetical to one another. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in two Israeli poetry writing workshops, which draw their pedagogy from the rapidly growing field of creative writing programs in the United States.