The Situation and the Story - The Art of Personal Narrative (Paperback, New ed. for writers, teachers, and students, 1st pbk. ed)

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

General

Imprint:	Farrar Straus Giroux
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	October 2002
First published:	October 2002
Authors:	Vivian Gornick
Dimensions:	191 x 129 x 12mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	174
Edition:	New ed. for writers, teachers, and students, 1st pbk. ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-374-52858-4
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General
LSN:	0-374-52858-6
Barcode:	9780374528584

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