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I was drawn to this article in the New York Times today because I'm in the process of writing an essay that is both personal and reflecting on the larger scene (as I see it). I recommend the piece. Here's a sample:
It mimics one of the earliest of narrative impulses, this kind of writing: to pull from one's own boring, agitated self the one who will make large sense of things; the persona — possessed of a tone, a syntax, a perspective not wholly one's own — who will find the story riding the tide that we, in our unmediated state, otherwise drown in.
That is what it means to become interested in one's own existence as a means of transforming event into writing experience.
In referring to this essay, I think back to an essay I read four years ago in The New York Review of Books by Joyce Carol Oates, a review of William Finnegan's Cold New World, which she describes in the following paragraph:
Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country belongs to a swelling nonfiction genre that might be called memoirist-reportage-a hybrid of investigative research and interviewing, sociopolitical analysis, and first-person narration that is often couched in the present tense, like the voice-over of a documentary film rolling past our eyes. In these works, "objectivity" is not the point; the writer breaks the frame to acknowledge, as William Finnegan does in his introduction, that his reporting method is "unscientific" and that the lines between himself and his subjects have "eroded." He may acknowledge emotional attachments with certain of his subjects (as Finnegan admits identifying with an eighteen-year-old druggie neo-Nazi skinhead named Jaxon Stines from Antelope Valley, California, not far from the suburb where Finnegan grew up in the 1950s), and he may intervene in his subjects' lives, further distending the historical perimeters of old-style journalism. In memoirist-reportage there is usually the disclaimer that the writer has been drawn to his subject for personal, subjective reasons, and that the work is not meant to be "representative"-as Finnegan makes clear in his epilogue, aptly titled "Midnight at the Casino"
[....]
Memoirist-reportage is a genre with an obvious appeal for contemporary tastes in which the "personal" (including the frankly confessional) is freely mixed with the "impersonal." ....
Oates made a strong impression on me because she gave me a term (memoirist-reportage) to describe a type of writing that was beginning to have a deeper appeal for me -- and a type of writing I wanted to explore.
[Note: Oates' essay in its entirety is available to subscribers to the electronic archive of the NYRB.]
Posted by Raymond Yee on 5/6/02; 4:06:31 PM
from the Unclassified dept.
Discuss
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Monday, May 6, 2002