2020-21 Pomona College Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
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ENGL189E PO - The Nonfiction Novel

When Offered: One-time only; fall 2020.
Instructor(s): E. Kindley
Credit: 1

Fictionality is built into the very definition of the novel form. In a sense, as the literary theorist Catherine Gallagher has observed, novels helped create the modern idea of fictionality, acclimatizing readers for the first time to narratives that were plausible but not truthful. How, then, are we to understand recurrent attempts to produce a ‘nonfiction novel’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (clustering in the 1960s and 70s, the heyday of the New Journalism, and in the 2010s, the era of ‘autofiction’)? Should this hybrid form be classified as a species of nonfiction journalism that borrows some of the formal techniques and cultural prestige of the novel, while continuing to be bound by the strictures and standards of factual reporting? Or do nonfiction novels lie closer to the heart of the novel’s tradition, given the form’s historical origins in a hazy gray area between reality and artifice, fiction and fact? Assigned authors may include Madeleine de Scudéry, Daniel Defoe, Marcel Proust, Ka-tzetnik 135633, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski, Danilo Kis, W.G. Sebald, Janet Malcolm, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman, and Teju Cole.
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1



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