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YORK UNIVERSITY: EN 3703
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Professor Julia Creet

 

office: 336 Calumet College
office phone: 736-5166, ext. 22566
office hours: wed 2:30-4:00  or by appointment

 

email: creet@yorku.ca

seminar room: 109 Founders College
seminar Time: Wednesday 11:30-2:30

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Course Description:

Literary nonfiction (creative nonfiction, literary journalism, new journalism, personal journalism) is a genre that has grown exponentially in the past two decades.   At its most achieved, it melds the accuracy of nonfiction with the dramatic force of fiction, the best of expository prose with the readability of the novel or the short story. In contrast to the objective stance demanded of journalists and academics alike, literary nonfiction encourages the writer to enter the text as either creative force or subjective presence.

Although early examples of literary nonfiction can be found the documentary realism of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier , John Hersey's Hiroshima and, arguably, Freud's famous “case histories,” the genre consolidated with the 1965 publication of Truman Capote's “nonfiction novel” as he called it, In Cold Blood   In this course we read some of the best-known authors of this genre and open current debates about its literary and factual merits. This course will also explore the craft of creative nonfiction and students will be required to write in the genre.

Course Requirements

First Term: 3 short assignments (500 words each) 15% or a 1500 word response paper 15%; seminar presentation (first or second term) 30% (15% for presentation; 15% for written submission);

Second Term: proposal for major essay (500 words) 10%; major essay (approx 2500) 25%; final exam 20%.

Reading List

  • Truman Capote, In Cold Blood   (Vintage 1965)
  • John Hersey, Hiroshima (Bantam 1946)
  • James Agee, Let us now Praise Famous Men   (Houghton Mifflin 1939)
  • Lillian Ross, Portrait of Hemingway (Random House 1961)
  • Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)
  • Art Spiegelman, Maus I : My Father Bleeds History   (Pantheon 1986)
  • Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (Pantheon, 2003)
  • John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil   (Vintage 1994)
  • Lynn Crosbie, Paul's Case (Insomniac Press 1997)