LARTS 361 — Creative Nonfiction

3 credits
Fall or Spring
Robert Lynn, Sheetal Majithia

Prerequisite: LARTS 112 . Creative nonfiction tells a story. The story might have a political, ecological, economic or racial focus. It might be about the art of glassblowing or animal husbandry, anything from a narrative history of the U.S. Civil War to a coming-of-age memoir—stories about what real people do, what happens to them, how they respond. The genre employs a journalist’s focus on facts; the dialogue and scenes of a novelist or playwright; the analytical thinking of an essayist; the images, musicality, and wordplay of a poet. Creative nonfiction writers use literary techniques when facts alone cannot adequately render the truth of a subject. They aim for the truth as they understand it. Strategic analysis of work by Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oats, John Hersey, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Tom Wolfe, Isabel Allende, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and John McPhee will serve as models for student writings to culminate in a manuscript of original essays.