It must certainly be true that MFA programs are not the source of all evil, or even of all the bad writing in American today. (MFA programs are more detrimental to the teachers, I think, than to the students). But the suggestion that Franz Kafka would have benefited from being in a writer's workshop is one of the most absurd ideas I've heard in a long time. "What do you mean, he turned into a cockroach? I don't think you've adequately prepared the reader for this? I think we need to know more about WHY Gregor and his father don't get along..." In fact, it's dreadful to imagine any great writer--Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Stevens, Frank O'Hara--having to endure a workshop. In fact the impossibility of imagining such writers happily getting their MFAs is perhaps the best argument against workshops.