A very late, very scattered blog post for this week. My poor poor paper has taken a massive back seat to the mayhem of halloween and, of course, THIS STUPID ELECTION. I can’t wait until it’s over. Anyway, here’s my scattered post, late and rambling. Many apologies.
1) -Keywords: truth, fiction, reality-based, life-based, character based
-Themes: readers’ clinging to memoir/autobiography/non-fiction in contemporary America; possible time-frame post 9/11 America. Or, comparing/contrasting to other trends/movements in literature [surrealism/magical realism, stream of consiousness?]. Or, blurring the lines somehow between fiction and non-fiction.
-Approach: Cultural studies? dare I say, structuralist? This area is sooo cloudy.
2) Haven’t ruled out Woolf. If I chose Woolf, I’d probably work with her essays about the craft of writing. I found some dynamite quotes:
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
At least me and V are somewhat on the same page. I’m still deciding between Frey’s A million Little Pieces and Capote’s In Cold Blood as my primary texts. I hope some of you who’ve read either piece can point me in one direction or the other. The other one that I don’t pick will certainly get honorable mention in my piece. Would using both as primary texts be out of the question?
3) Plat of attack: Yikes. I am so unprepared. I need major input. I should have wrote this blog earlier. Melt down. Ummm, I suppose figuring out what the hell I want to talk about would be a good place to start. I think Middleton is going to be scheduling a meeting with me right quick. At least I’m being honest, right? After that, I know the argument I want to make but I don’t know who, if anyone, would support me out there in the literary world. I want to argue that there is a distinct craving for non-fiction/fact based literature in contemporary America, thus the dawning of creative non-fiction, and I want to talk about how this changes the novel. How does this change the novel? Good question. That’s the next step. I’d say it leaves little room for disconnected, fractional narratives within the 21st century literary construct. What is a fractional narrative? God I’m having a Vaneeta-define-your-terms moment so hard right now. Maybe what I mean is people don’t want to read about people with perfect lives anymore. Perhaps a good starting point would be the stream of consciousness movement since it started to try and imitate the actual thoughts of real people. Yes, that’s what I’m going with for now.
