Documentary America: Non-Fiction Writing

Documentary America: Non-Fiction Writing

MODULE DESCRIPTION
The study of American fiction often precludes an examination of some of the best writing and forms of self-representation that America has produced: political and photo-essays, social science publications, journalism, reportage, and documentary film. This module examines the development of iconic non-fictional American literature and its relation with other forms of visual representation (such as film and photography) from the 19th century to the 20th centuries. We will look at the style, content and circulation of non-fictional forms and examine their relationship within wider discourses of cultural, social and political representation in America. We will also look at the ways that these forms intersect with the development of modernist and postmodernist literature in the US more broadly. For this module you will have to read from a broad selection of materials that do not necessarily fit into conventional literary genres and you will be watching a number of realist and neo-realist American documentaries. We will analyse why writers and artists have chosen to represent events in the way that they do and the wider cultural impact of those forms.
ASSESSMENT
One 6000 word dissertation - 100%
SEMINARS
A 2 hour seminar each week supplemented by film screenings on allocated weeks.
PRESENTATIONS
You and at least one partner will be asked to present a critically informed response to material allocated for one of the weeks in the Spring term.

Preparing & Giving Presentations

For your presentations, you and your partner need to:

Research and read materials related to that week’s topic. Feel free to supplement your talk with texts related to the material on the reading list. Present a critical response to some of this material , and let us know what you think of those points. I advise focusing on one or two important points. Try to present alternative views and perspectives – including counter-arguments and then trying to refute them is always a good way of advancing your arguments in a critically informed way.

Relevant passages from the materials and from the primary reading should be provided to the class either in a handout or in a (very) short PowerPoint presentation. See this as an opportunity to have aconversationwith a room of experts in the relevant topic you’re discussing. After your presentation, you should be prepared to answer questions from class-members.

Presentations are a starting point for seminar group discussion. They are NOT mini-essays that you simply read out, thus sending everyone else to sleep right at the beginning of the seminar! Don’t worry about being formal – the main aim is to communicate your own ideas and generate some interesting discussion.

There are various ways of making a presentation useful without doing ridiculous amounts of work in preparing it:

· you can present, very simply, a set ofquestionsfor the whole seminar group to discuss

· you can begin with yourpersonal reactionsto the reading you have done and then invite reactions from the rest of the group

· you can present someextra researchyou have done (in the library, or on the web) that you found helpful, and explain why

· you can prepare arole-playwhere each of you presents a different side of an argument

· you can split the seminar group up into smallersub-groupsand give them a task to do

By all means, use your creativity and work together as a team so you benefit from each other’s thoughts (plus, not having sole responsibility helps with nerves too).

Your tutor will tell you whom you will be presenting with, and when.

Presentations should be no shorter than 15 minutes and no longer than 20 minutes. Make sure you leave at least 20 minutes for post-presentation discussions.Useful tips on giving academic presentations can be found on the following sites:

http://www.studyskills.soton.ac.uk/studytips/presentations.htm

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/learnhigher/giving-oral-presentations/

http://www.canberra.edu.au/studyskills/learning/oral
Weekly Reaction and Response Papers
After week one all students will be asked to complete a brief non-assessed writing task in preparation for the seminar. You must produce a brief piece of writing (no more than 400 words and preferably just one page) which engages in some way with the material allocated for that week. This is an opportunity for you to be creative in your response to the materials on the module and to say what you want without fear of being "wrong". It will also keep you writing in practice for your dissertation. By week 10 you will have compiled a collection of written pieces which you will be able to use/rewrite or refer to as a resource for writing your dissertation. When you have chosen your dissertation topic, you may use any of the material you have already created if you wish.The main point of the exercise is to stimlate your ability to critically reflect and write on the formal properties and the thematic content of the non-fiction primary texts (visual and verbal) on the module and should help you focus and refine your ideas as you embark on the process of writing your dissertation.

NOTE RE. MATERIALS AND READING
Note: the reading for week one and two is available either on-line or in the case of the secondary reading in pdf form in the relevant week - see the sections for weeks one and two. Reading for subsequent weeks will need to be purchased (in the case of primary materials) or accessed in the library (secondary). I'm aware there is a substantial amount of primary reading to do for many seminars and I'll try to keep the prescribed secondary reading to manageable proportions. There will, however, be at least some secondary reading that you will need to do in advance of seminars.

·  Dissertations - GuidelinesEDIT

·  dissertation - guidelines (summary)EDIT

·  Dissertation - Research ProposalEDIT

Week One. Journalism: Selections from Whitman, Twain, Hemingway and Steinbeck.

Week Two. Documenting the City: the Photo-Journalism and Social Reform of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Week Three: Documentary Film invented: Nanook of the North (1922).

Week Four: Oral History and Ethnography WPA Life Histories and Hurston's Folk Life Research

Week Five: Documenting the Great Depression

Week Seven: The Sociological imagination : Conformism and the 1950s: David Reisman

Week Eight: Women and Non-Fiction writing.

Week Nine: The Vietnam Reality Effect: Reports and Vietnam photography

Week Ten: New Journalism: selections from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Week Eleven: Fly on the wall? The reality fictions of Frederick Wiseman.

Week Twelve: Documenting American death and module review

Dissertation

Marking and Feedback information

Week One. Journalism: Selections from Whitman, Twain, Hemingway and Steinbeck.

Reading

Whitman: Prose Work selections: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/other/CompleteProse.html#leaf012r1 - Students read and print out the following brief sections from Specimen Days :

Abraham Lincoln; Hospitals Ensemble; Down at the Front; Union Prisoners South;A Glimpse of War's Hell-Scenes; Female Nurses for Soldiers; The Inauguration; Death of President Lincoln; Death of a Pennsylvania Soldier; Scenes On Ferry And River - Last Winter's Nights; Two City Areas, Certain Hours; Central Park Walks and Talks; The Prairies; On to Denver - A Frontier Incident; Steam Power, Telegraphs Etc.; Denver Impressions; The Prairies and Great Plains in Poetry;

Twain: Mark Twain's journalism at Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900821h.html

Students read and print out selections fromRoughing It. Go to: http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/roughingit/rihp.html.Students read chapters 40, 42;

'The Private History of a Campaign That Failed ' - online available at : http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Private_History_of_a_Campaign_That_Failed - Also available in numerous editions of Twain's work in the Library, including Sketches .

Hemingway, " Who Murdered the Vets? A First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane," New Masses 16 (Sept. 17, 1935): essay in Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York: International Publishers, 1969).[Nb: see below for pdf file - print out and bring to class]

Steinbeck: "Harvest Gypsies". See http://newdeal.feri.org/steinbeck/hg01.htm

Secondary (non-essential) but also of interest: Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa's,A Russian Journal(1948) is a compellingly writtenaccount of their journey through Cold War Russia. However, Steinbeck'sTravels with Charley:In Search of America(1962) is now thought to be more fiction than eyewitness account.

Secondary Reading

Shelly Fishkin: From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America, [Nb: see below for an extract from Fishkin's book: read, print-out the pdf document and bring to Seminar 1.]

Further Secondary Reading: Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Thomas B. Connery, ed., A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992).

Jack London,The People of the Abyss(1903). Online with illustrations at:http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/

Study Questions:

What characteristics distinguish non-fiction texts from other kinds of texts?

What are the limitations of such categorization?

What functions does American journalism have in the 19th and early twentieth centuries?

Is there evidence in this week's texts that the 'reporter' is presented as a particularly American personality?

What are the various implications of the use of the first-person authorial persona in the texts by Whitman, Twain and Hemingway?

·  Shelly Fishkin: From Fact to Fiction - ExtractEDIT

·  Ernest Hemingway: 'Who Murdered the Vets?' (in New Masses, editor Joseph North)EDIT

·  Seminar Handout - Week OneEDIT

·  Civil War Photo Archive Library of Congress - context for WhitmanEDIT

·  Week 1 ReadingEDIT

·  Specimen Days selectionsEDIT

·  Mark Twain Roughing ItEDIT

·  A Private History of a Campaign that FailedEDIT

·  The Spanish EarthEDIT

Week Two. Documenting the City: the Photo-Journalism and Social Reform of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Students all to study the selections at :http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/davis/photography/riis/riis.html

How The Other Half Lives(full text online)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/davis/photography/hine/hine.html

Link to the photography slideshowhttp://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/Davis/photography/slideshows/slideshows.html

Secondary Reading

Theorizing documentary- Renov, Michael, 1993. Read introduction for seminar. see below for an extract -Introduction and Chapter One 'Towards a Poetics of Documentary'. The first document contains the first page only - the rest is in the second document. Read, print out and bring to class.]

The virtues of the vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the spectacle of the slum- Gandal, Keith, 199. [Sections on Riis are very useful]

You might also be interested in Luc Sante'sLow Life(1991).

and....Jack London,The People of the Abyss(1903). Online with illustrations at:http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/

Seminar Questions

1. Renov argues that all discursive forms, including documentary, are to some extent 'fictive'. To what extent does American nonfiction writing, photography and film narrativize the real?

2. How does Riis's and Hine's work deploy narrative in its representation of reality?

3. Do you think their aim is to be advocates of social reform or does their work have other aims?

4. What relationship do we have, as spectators, to the spectacles documented in these texts and images?

NOTE ON SCREENING: The screening for Week 3 - Nanook of the North - location and time TBC

·  Michael Renov: Theorizing Documentary - Introduction and Chapter OneEDIT

·  Michael Renov: Theorizing Documentary - Introduction and Chapter OneEDIT

·  Jabob Riis - How the Other Half LivesEDIT

·  Riis - How the Other Half Lives - Bandits RoostEDIT

·  Article on Lewis HineEDIT

·  Article on Jacob RiisEDIT

·  Muybridge and documenting the bodyEDIT

·  Taylorized spectacleEDIT

·  Stephen Crane's 'An Experiment in Misery'EDIT

·  Up From,the Streets: Hine in SurveyEDIT

Week Three: Documentary Film invented: Nanook of the North (1922).

Screening: Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North (1922).

Reading

Rothman, William. "The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty'sNanook of the North." InDocumenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, 23–39. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998. [NB: see below for pdf version - Read and bring to class]

Eric Barnouw,Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film(read chapter 2).

Documenting the documentary: close readings of documentary film and video- Grant, Barry Keith, Sloniowski, Jeannette, 1998

Book | Essential | Read chapter by William Rothman on Nanook of the North [Chapter available in pdf form below]

Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film- Barnouw, Erik, 1993

Book | Essential | Read chapter 2 [relevant excerpt available in pdf form below]

American documentary film: projecting the nation- Geiger, Jeffrey, 2011

Book | Essential | Read chapter 2, case study on Nanook

·  Jeffrey Geiger American Documentary Film Chapter 2: Virtual Travels and the Tourist GazeEDIT

·  Eric Barnouw: Documentary: a history of non-fiction film: Chapter 2 (Flaherty case study)EDIT

·  William Rothman The Filmmaker as HunterEDIT

Week Four: Oral History and Ethnography WPA Life Histories and Hurston's Folk Life Research

1.  Reading

American Life Histories:http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html

Task: Survey and search this database: find one story to bring into class to discuss.

Zora Neale HurstonMules and Men: athttp://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EMA01/Grand-Jean/Hurston/Chapters/index.html

Secondary reading onWPA Life Histories

Mangione, Jerre.The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project,1935-1943.

M. N. Penkower, The Federal Writers' Project: a study in Government patronage of the arts(1977)

Jerrold Hirsch,Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

Week Five: Documenting the Great Depression

Selections from photo essays with photos by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee and Margaret Bourke-White. See the following photo Essay on the 1930s at:http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/photoessay.htm

View one of the following New Deal Documentary films: King Vidor's Our Daily Bread, Pare Lorentz, The Plow that Broke the Plains, The River. [Available on youtube and in the Library]: King Vidor's Our Daily Bread, Pare Lorentz, The Plow that Broke the Plains [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCwhjWNcH8&list=PLD47D9F44CB7A7E03&index=1&feature=plpp_video], The River [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ium31et6rd8]

The following website is a useful source for documentaries on American life in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II.http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/huffman/frontier/frontier.html

Stott, William.Documentary Expression and Thirties America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. [Note: see below for an extract to read in preparation for the seminar]

Guimond, James American Photography and the American DreamCh. 4 "The Signs of Hard Times". [Note: see below for an extract to read in preparation for the seminar]