4-Week: Fiction as History, History as (Non)Fiction—Resources, Questions, and Quandaries When Writing the Past

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his essay "On the Concept of History"; James Baldwin asserted that “people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." This course is for any writer for whom the theme of the past looms large—its vagaries and specifities, its adumbrations and naked revelations. What does it mean to write truthfully about the past through fiction, memoir, reportage? To what extent is it even possible to do so, especially in an age when individual narrative is so often conflated with pure truth? What happens when the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction begin to break down? We'll engage with a diversity of sources in order to investigate history as a theme in and of itself, and as a means of enriching our own literary work: writings from Baldwin and Benjamin, from Toni Morrison, Timothy Snyder, W.G. Sebald, Tommy Orange, Tony Kushner, Tim O’Brien, and Sallie Tisdale, among others. From the broadly thematic we’ll also move to the ethical and craft questions that trouble writers of the historical in any genre: What questions must we grapple with when writing pasts that we know others remember and interpret differently? How do we embark on good historical research, and also know when to stop researching? Do we ever have license to alter details for the sake of narrative? This will be primarily a lecture- and discussion-based course, but with ample opportunities for participants to share selections of their work and receive first-blush feedback from their colleagues and the instructor.