Advanced Non-Fiction Workshop: The Ethics of Memoir

The human animal is an intensely private as well as public creature, shaped by family ties and other intimate social relationships, as well as by place, memory, culture, history, and nation(s). So how should a writer navigate personal experience to “show not tell,” as the adage goes, particularly when other humans are involved? How have writers of the past and present understood the politics of written description, and what strategies and values guide their attempts to evoke the power of formative places, beloved (and less beloved) people, and crucial events? In this course we will contemplate these questions as we explore the complexities of fact, fiction, and the tricky gray area between the two. We will move among memoir, narrative non-fiction, and autofiction, reading such authors as Hilton Als, James Baldwin, Alexander Chee, Margery Kempe, Michel de Montaigne, Maggie Nelson, Sei Shonagon, Virginia Woolf, and others. Students will generate critical and creative work based on their own experiences and research, with room for interdisciplinary/multi-genre output. (Prerequisite: one intro CRWR course, or by instructor approval) 3 hrs. sem.