Creative nonfiction: Chasing its own tale
Item
-
Title
-
Creative nonfiction: Chasing its own tale
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:f3c58892ee9d:10596
-
identifier
-
10939
-
Creator
-
Grayson, Isabel,
-
Contributor
-
Sondra Perl
-
Date
-
2010
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Rhetoric | creative | essay | memoir | nonfiction | trauma
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation explores the theory, history, and criticism of creative nonfiction to foreground the issues of truth in personal writing. My thesis focuses on memoir and personal essay and asks whether creative nonfiction can deliver on its promise, whether it can lay bare the bones of nonfiction using creative tools. I explore how authors problematize truth in their works and what challenges creative nonfiction writers and readers to trust the truth of self in texts. I examine the pitfalls of creative nonfiction -- what gives it an unreliable reputation in some circles and why its ethics are questioned.;Creative nonfiction pilfers from genres that also pilfer from one another so that it lives in a borderland of shifting boundaries that defy neat categorization. At the heart of my project, I offer evidence that creative nonfiction can be as authentic as the "self-evacuated prose of western epistemology" (Bishop 34), for self, truth and the world mirror one another, tell the truth on one another as they shape and reshape one another with time. This messy movement and plasticity can be more honest than some distilled truth that unrealistically offers an ironclad meaning behind the curtain of objectivity or omniscience. With self's face in front of each word in creative nonfiction, the "I" stands honest, putting truth where its mouth is, holding the self accountable, reminding us, lest we forget, a being with all its desires, hatreds, memories, narratives, biases is, after all, honestly in everything we write and read. Truth then becomes human. This dissertation argues with the first person singular and creative nonfiction for the first person singular and creative nonfiction as a valid means of truth/knowledge-making in our personal essays, and finally in our students' writing. In short, this project chases the tale of creative nonfiction through the centuries.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
