Pulling Reality’s Hair: Truth and Other Fictions

We will, in this seminar, occupy ourselves with works that straddle or blur or occasionally just flat out ignore the aesthetic divide between fiction and non-fiction, in the hopes of getting a better grip on the relation between self and other, word and world, narrative strategy and fidelity to truths both large and small. Hence readings will include biographical and autobiographical novels, novelistic treatments of biography and autobiography, and a number of hybrid composites that cannot be classified, though we will surely try. Readings will include Nabokov, Proust, Henry Adams, J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Gregoire Bouillier, Art Spiegelman, and Spalding Gray. In addition we will view films by Ross McElwee, Andre Gregory, and Charlie Kaufman. This course is not open to students who have taken ENAM 0307. (3 hrs. sem.)