01   TF3     CAC   70558   JURECIC  MU-002

02   MW7   CAC    73367   ELLIS     MU-001

SECTION 01 SAME AS 355:402

01- In 1966, Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, a book-length, novelistic account of the brutal murder of a family in what had seemed to be a tranquil Kansas farming town. This text is now recognized as the first example of a hybrid literary genre that Capote labeled the “nonfiction novel”—that is, a genre in which the techniques of fiction are used to present factual accounts. At first, this combination may seem paradoxical. How, after all, can a text be both creative and factual? But, when you think about it, plenty of literature combines fact with elements of fiction—memoir and biography, for instance, and autobiographical novels. Capote’s innovation was to connect fact and fiction within journalistic accounts, an approach that later developed into the “new journalism.”  The appeal of such texts is their narrative approach, as well as the detailed and personal perspectives authors often bring to their subjects. “Above all,” Capote explained, a creative nonfiction writer must “empathize with personalities outside his usual imaginative range, mentalities unlike his own, kinds of people he would never have written about had he not been forced to by encountering them inside the journalistic situation.” This course in creative nonfiction will be, like its topic, a hybrid—in this case combining literary study and writing. We will read work by contemporary writers who, like Capote, seek to empathize with minds and lives that seem distant or unfamiliar. Our primary focus, however, will be composing our own creative nonfiction essays—two short essays of 5-6 pages and one longer 15-page essay. In preparation for writing, students will also compile research portfolios.  Readings may include articles, essays, or excerpts by writers such as: Edwidge Dandicat, Anne Fadiman, Atul Gawande, Malcolm Gladwell, Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, Michael Pollan, Lauren Slater, and Art Spiegelman. 

02-Investigation, through weekly reading and writing assignments, of creative non-fiction, emphasizing modes of first-person writing such as memoirs, travel narratives, and personal essays.