My new course at NYU, Fall '10

Nonfiction Narratives: Multiple Accounts
In this workshop, we’ll embrace oral history as both methodology and genre, seizing upon narrative discrepancies as oral history opportunities. Considering texts such as Voices from Chernobyl and Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me, we’ll explore how oral history can help us approach complex subjects and historic events, particularly those stories containing conflicting accounts. As part of this discussion, we’ll examine the elastic nature of memory, and the distinctions between individual memory and collective memory. We will challenge ourselves to reflect divergent viewpoints in our nonfiction writing, borrowing the lessons of conventional, as well as more overtly experimental nonfiction to accomplish this. How do we chronicle stories that do not conform to narrative convention? How can we retain conflicting accounts within our chronicle, rather than synthesizing them into one account? Students will read newspapers daily, looking for missing stories and missing voices. These omissions will serve as the inspiration for weekly interviews and writing projects. The work of writers and documentarians such as Mary Ellen Mark, Luc Sante, Anna Deveare Smith, Moises Kaufman, and Alex Haley will be included in our coursework.