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4 books match the query 'Nonfiction novel'
Fragments of a Mortal Mind
A Nonfiction NovelDonald Anderson
University of Nevada Press, 2021
At once a memoir, a reading journal, and a novel, Fragments of a Mortal Mind is a daring, contemporary commonplace book. Donald Anderson, critically acclaimed author of Gathering Noise from My Life and Below Freezing, shows us how the disparate elements of our lives collect to construct our deepest selves and help us to make sense of it all. Anderson layers his personal experiences and reflections with those of others who have wrestled with inner and outer social, cultural, and political memories that are not as accurate as history might suggest but that each of us believe nonetheless. He challenges the reader’s sense of memory and fact, downplaying the latter in explaining how each of us crafts our own personal histories.
As Anderson weaves his voice among numerous other voices and ideas that rest upon other ideas, we are faced with larger issues of human existence: war, memory, trauma, mortality, religion, fear, joy, ugliness, and occasional beauty. What we have here is a meditation on living in America. We are shown how the world we consume becomes us as we metabolize it. How we, as humans, through our own fragments of memories, influences, and experiences become our true selves. By charting fragments of thoughts over a lifetime, Anderson exposes a way of thinking and perceiving the world that is refreshingly intuitive and desperately needed. Fragments of a Mortal Mind is a powerful masterpiece that closely resembles our lived experiences and is a vivid reflection of our time.
MATTERS OF FACT
READING NONFICTION OVER THE EDGEDANIEL W. LEHMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
Style as Argument
Contemporary American NonfictionChirs Anderson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987
Taking the position that style has a value in its own right, that language forms a major component of the story a nonfiction writer has to tell, Anderson analyzes the work of America’s foremost practitioners of New Journalism—Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion.
Anderson does for nonfiction what insightful critics have long been doing for fiction and poetry. His approach is rhetorical, and his message is that the rhetoric of Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, and Didion is a direct response to the problem of trying to convey to a general audience the sublime, inexplicable, or private and intuitive experiences that conventional rhetoric cannot evoke.
The emphasis in this book is on style, not genre, and the analysis characterizes the distinctive styles of four American writers, showing how the richness and complexity of their prose discloses an important argument about the value of language itself. Their prose is complex, nuanced, layered, affecting, always aware of itself as style. This self-consciousness, Anderson contends, prepares the reader to regard style as argument, a “tacit but powerful statement about the value of form as form, style as style.”
The Rhetoric of the "Other" Literature
W. Ross Winterowd
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990
Using traditional and contemporary rhetorical theory, Winterowd argues that the fiction-nonfiction division of literature is unjustified and destructive.
He would bridge the gap between literary scholars and rhetoricians by including both fiction (imaginative literature) and nonfiction (literature of fact) in the canon. The actual difference in literary texts, he notes, lies not in their factuality but in their potential for eliciting an aesthetic response.
With speech act and rhetorical theory as a basis, Winterowd argues that presentational literature gains its power on the basis of its ethical and pathetic appeal, not because of its assertions or arguments.