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Reading Schedule
Fall Term: 2011
    N.B. All secondary readings are required for Seminar Presenters and recommended for all students
September 7 Introduction: “Is it a Genre?”

Wolfe, Tom."The Birth of 'The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe." February 14, 1972, New York Magazine. (The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 1-52)
  14

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (Vintage 1965)


Heyne, Eric. “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (Autumn 1987): 479-90.

David S. Caudill, "The Year of Truman Capote: Legal Ethics and In Cold Blood." Oregon Law Review. 86.2 (2007): 295-328.

By George Plimpton, "The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel." Interview with Truman Capote. New York Times, January 16, 1966.

Additional Sources


Hollowell, John. "Capote's In Cold Blood: The Search for Meaningful Design." Arizona Quarterly 53.3     (1997): 97-116.


Hellmann, John. "Death and Design in In Cold Blood: Capote's 'Nonfiction Novel' as Allegory." Ball State University Forum (1980) 21:2: 65-78.


Clarke, Gerald. capote: a biography. New York: Avalon, 1988.


Waldmeir, Joseph J. and John C. Waldmeirhet, eds. Critical response to Truman Capote. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1999.

  21

Barry Callghan reading 12-2 pm at Paul Delaney Gallery in Bethune.

He'll be reading from his new book of essays Raise You Twenty and will talk about his career as journalist, writer and publisher.

 
  28 John Hersey, Hiroshima (Bantam 1946)

Sharp, Patrick B. “"From Yellow Peril to Yellow Wasteland: John Hersey's Hiroshima"” Twentieth Century Literature 46.4 (2000): 434 - 452.

Yavenditti, Michael J. "John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of Hiroshima." Pacific Historical Review 43.1 (1974): 24-49.

Hersey, John. “The Legend on the Licence.” The Yale Review 75 (Winter 1986): 289-314.

Hersey, John. "The Novel of Contemporary History." The Atlantic 184 (Nov 1949): 80-84. Reprinted in The Writer's Book, ed. Helen Hull (NewYork: Harper and Brothers, 1950): 23-30.
October 5 Capote and Hersey Seminars (How To Present Effective Seminars)

First Short Essay Due: Descriptive Writing

Assignment and Examples
  12 READING WEEK: NO CLASS
  19 James Agee, Let us now Praise Famous Men (Houghton Mifflin 1939).

Jackson, Bruce. “The Deceptive Anarchy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” The Antioch Review 57.1 Winter (1999): 38-49.

Reed, T.V. “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodern Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men .” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 156-76.

Schultz, William Todd. “Off-Stage Voices in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Reportage as Covert Autobiography.” American Imago 56.1 (1999): 75-104.

Cosgrove, Peter. "Snapshots of the Absolute: Mediamachia in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." American Literature 67.2 (June 1995): 329 - 357.

  26

Agee seminars

Second Short Essay: Close Reading



  November 2

Lilian Ross, Portrait of Hemingway (Random House 1961)

Eby, Cecil. "Bothering to Explain Hemingway's 'How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?'" The Hemingway Review 5.2 (Spring 1986): 47 - 48.

Ross, Lillian. "Hemingway Told Me Things." New Yorker 25.12 (May 24, 1999): 70 - 73.

Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner, 1960. 232 - 278.

Del Gizzo, Suzanne. "Going Home: Hemingway, Primitivism, and Identity." Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (Fall 2003): 496-523,



  9 Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Noonday Press 1968)
Read: "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream"; "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"; and "On Going Home."

Harrison, Barbara. "Joan Didion: Only Disconnect."

Schlib, John. "Deconstructing Didion: Poststructuralist Rhetorical Theory in Composition Class." Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Ed. by Chris Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1989. 262 - 287.

Heilker, Paul. "The Struggle For Articulation and Didion's Construction of the Reader's Self-Respect in Slouching Toward Bethlehem." Critic 54.3
  16

Ross and Didion seminars
  23

Seminars: 25 Years of the Canadian Magazine Awards


Third Short Description Due

30 Proposal Development: Library Research Seminar

Winter Term: 2011
January 4 Lecture on Mas'ud Zavarzadeh The Mythopoeic Reality

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh "The Apocalyptic Fact and the Aclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narrative." Journal of American Studies 9.1 (1975) 69-83.

See also: On line resources for PDF.
  11 Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History. (New American Library, 1968)

Tonn, Horst. "Making Sense of Contemporary Reality: The Construction of Meaning in the Nonfiction Novel." Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature.Ed. by Bernd Engler and Kurt Muller.

Hellmann, John. "Journalism as Metafiction: Norman Mailer's Strategy for Mimesis and Interpretation in a Postmodern World." Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 35 - 65.

White, Hayden. "The Modernist Event." The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. Ed. by Vivian Sobchack. New York: Routledge, 1996. 17 - 39.


Essay Proposals ready for peer review
  18 James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother


Essay Proposals due
  25

McBride and Mailer Seminars

 
February 1 Art Spiegelman, Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (Pantheon 1986).
 OR
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (Pantheon 2003)

Young, James. "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History." Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1988): 666 - 700.

Wilner, Arlene. ""Happy, happy ever after": Story and History in Art Spiegelman's Maus." Journal of Narrative Technique 27.2 (1997): 171 - 189. Iadonisi, Rick. "Bleeding History and Owning His [Father's] Story: Maus and Collaborative Autobiography." Critic 57.1: 41 - 55.

Staub, Michael. "The Shoah Goes On and On: Rememberance and Representation in Art Speigelman's Maus." MELUS 20.3 (Autumn 1995): 33 - 46.

White, Hayden. "the modernist event." The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. Ed. by Vivian Sobchack. New York, 1996. 17 - 38.

Hirsch, Marianne. "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory." Discourse 15.2 (Winter 1992-93): 3 - 29


Malek, Amy. “Memoir as Iranian exile cultural production: A case study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series.” Iranian Studies 39. 3 (September 2006): 353-380

Davis, Rocío G. “A Graphic Self.” Prose Studies 27. 3 (December 2005) 264-279.
  8 Maus and Persepolis Seminars

 

15
John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Vintage 1994).

Huddelston, Eugene L. "Literary Nonfiction: Extending Its Definition." The Midwest Quarterly 33 (Spring 1992): 340 - 356.

Kanner, Melinda. "Savannah After Midnight." The Gay and Lesbian Review (May-June 2002): 22 - 23.

Dufresne, Marcel. "Why Midnight May Be Darker Than You Think." Columbia Journalism Review 37.1 (May-June 1998): 78 -79.
  22 Reading Week
  29 Lynn Crosbie, Paul's Case (Insomniac Press 1997).

Marchand, Philip. "Confession and Critique: The Work of Lynn Crosbie." Essays on Canadian Writing 73 (Spring 2001): 141 - 150.

Crosbie, Lynn. "Loving the Killer: Where Art and Life Don't Meet." This Magazine 28.7 (March-April 1995): 12 - 15.

Crosbie, Lynn. "Lynn's Case: Interview By Kerri Huffman." Taddle Creek.
March 7 Essay Workshop
  14 Berendt and Crosbie Seminars
  21 Final Essays Due

Open Seminars
  28 Exam review