Does fiction function as archive or as repertoire? Diana Taylor's distinction between these two modes of memory fails to fully explore fictional attempts to capture a repertoire of performance within the archival page, while Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Janet Frame's The Carpathians, and Jose Saramago's All the Names posit the novel as a site where repertoires of embodied knowledge can be captured within the literary archive, producing memory as a powerful presence by interring its mediated images within the silent page. A comparison of these novels suggests the richly paradoxical relationships among fiction, cultural performance, and memory.
In a 2002 article in College English, Peter Elbow argued that writing pedagogy would benefit by “[m]ore honoring of style, playfulness, fun, pleasure, humor” (543). Although Elbow was referring specifically to the need for cross-fertilization between the disciplines of literature and composition, his call for attention to playfulness in writing pedagogy is equally relevant to the teaching of creative nonfiction. The question he fails to consider is how playfulness can become an essential part of writing pedagogy without undermining the seriousness of the endeavor. My experience teaching an upper-level creative nonfiction class devoted to humor writing suggests that while incorporating playfulness into nonfiction-writing pedagogy poses serious challenges, it also provides significant rewards and develops skills transferable to other writing tasks.
Why would an English professor enroll in an upper-level biology class? This article describes an experiment in interdisciplinarity: an English professor takes a class titled Scientific Imaging in order to enhance her teaching of nature writing. The author outlines thirteen specific lessons imparted by her experience as a student in a class devoted to photographing elements of the natural world and creating images suitable for scientific presentation, and then she explains how she adapted the principles from Scientific Imaging for use in a creative nonfiction class focusing on nature writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of this interdisciplinary experiment and suggestions for promoting interdisciplinary learning as a mode of faculty development.
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