MEMBER BLOG TAG: literary memoirs
| Thursday, May 7, 2009 11:53PM | | | | Is Fiction Literature? | Tags: Nonfiction and Literature, Nonfiction and fiction, Nobel Prize, Norbert Gstrein, Literary Memoirs, Philip Gourevitch, Colum McCann, V.S. Naipaul
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Is it snobbery, a club mentality, or territorial insecurity that underlies the suggestion that literature consists of fiction and poetry, and only fiction and poetry? For me, this tenuous notion was decisively exploded by the late Seymour Krim, Columbia University prof, at whose “Creative Nonfiction” class most of what was read in the class was either actually fiction, or difficult to distinguish from the best fiction; Krim said he observed only one taboo: Physical violence against a fellow student was absolutely prohibited. (The story of that class is told in my literary memoir, The Killing of an Author.) Indeed, if you were to start reading V.S. Naipaul somewhere in the middle of one of his books, it would be hard to tell the... | | | | | |
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