HISTORY OF NONFICTION

In this seminar we will consider modern nonfiction as “the literature of fact” as we trace the course of the genre’s development from the mid-19th century to the present day. Along the way, we’ll see how magazines emerged, beginning in the 1860s, as the prime venue for American nonfiction, with excursions into—and glimpses of—publications that have shaped our shared cultural history, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, Esquire, Harper’s, New York, and Gourmet. Our readings will include reportage, criticism, memoir, and profile-writing and we will ask questions about these various nonfiction forms: Can criticism be the equal of art? How do nonfiction writers establish “authority”? How do they investigate the past and make sense of the new? How do they create work as rich and challenging as the best literary novels and short stories? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Some of the writers we will consider: Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace.

The course will welcome guest speakers.