Senior Seminar

From “fake news” to “semi-fictional” memoirs and the resurgence of “true crime” narratives, the stylistic presentation of facts has renewed its relevance across politics and culture in the 21st century. This course will explore how we got here, tracing the history of non-fiction and documentary work from the 1950s to today as we investigate how writers construct the limits of “fictionality,” what value poetry adds to a legal text, why activist authors have claimed novels “defang” the potential of political writing, and how artists have turned to different media (print, photography, film) for their “truth value.” Along the way, we will follow the invention of true crime in Argentina and the United States to its resurgence in podcasts like Serial; study the different trajectories of testimonial writing in Latin America (Rigoberta Menchú, Elena Poniatowska) and the “new journalism” of Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe in the United States; and examine more recent writing from Roxanne Gay, Dave Eggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Maggie Nelson. Further reading, watching, and / or listening will include, C. Rankine, E. Morris, S. Hartman, J. Baldwin, S. Alexeivich, C. Reznikoff, E. Welty, W.T. Vollmann, M. Mrabet, and others.