ENGL 009N. First Year Seminar : Between Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction

What makes a story true? What are the borders between memoir / creative nonfiction and fiction that draws from an author’s lived experiences, and how porous are these borders? When a memoirist includes dialogue from when they were eight years old, are we to assume that they are directly quoting an audio recording? When a novelist named, say, Moriel, centers a story around a novelist named Zoriel, are we to allow that every detail about this character is utterly imaginary? Put otherwise, why is it that when we read memoirs, we often ask, “Did this really happen?” and when we read fiction, we often ask, “How much of this is based on real life?” What impact does this border, between memoir and perhaps-autobiographical fiction, have on the real world? When is it useful, and when is it limiting? How can reading and writing fiction inform our creative nonfiction, and vice versa? How can fictionalizing a story increase its truthfulness? And how can faithfully retelling a true story be an act of deepest art [/artifice?] In this workshop, we will explore these questions and more, through close reading and in-class discussion, and through workshopping original student writing, both in the form of creative nonfiction / memoir, and in fiction.
Humanities
1
Spring 2024. Rothman-Zecher.
Spring 2025. Rothman-Zecher.
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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