Theorizing the Nonfiction Distinction

Nonfiction, as a literary critical category, has since the 1970s been increasingly discussed and persistently ignored at the same time. Pop literary histories have been given to saying that nonfictional genres are on the rise: autobiography and life writing have migrated from genres of history into being the proper objects of literary studies; programs in and journals for “creative nonfiction” have followed on the “memoir boom” of the 1990s and the return of the essay as a popular form; new genres like autotheory, autoethnography, and autofiction have been the subjects of panels and special issues. These developments are, perhaps, of a piece with the program era, in Mark McGurl’s formulation, or, as Anna Kornbluh writes, this moment's preoccupation with nonfictional genres may be a part of late capitalism’s style of immediacy.[1] And yet, as she also points out, the fetishization of nonfictional genres also involves a fetishization of the dissolution of the the distinction between fictional and nonfictional status.[2] If in one arena the dissolution of that distinction is celebrated as a skeptical achievement, it is likewise a feature of our current moment that in other arenas it is what is most worried over and bemoaned, that the problem with the “post-truth” moment is that readers don’t “believe facts” and can’t tell them from fiction. 

This seminar proposes to examine the fiction/not-fiction demarcational phenomenon, or the distinction of fiction, as Dorrit Cohn put it, from the perspective of its minor, recent, and provincial term.[3] It takes as a starting point the question of whether nonfiction really is the purely negative industry-driven category than it seems, and asks whether "nonfiction" might encode a positive literary critical and epistemic concept other than the uncritical designation for "true writing" or "representations of the real" that it seems to be. As the paragraph above implies, to provincialize the notion of nonfiction is to recognize it as a distinctly American term – and yet it is a term that has both gained traction as an international export, and one that has older cognates in other languages and literary traditions. This seminar invites papers that address such questions as: can we approach “nonfiction” through the interdisciplinary study of fictionality? Is nonfiction synonymous with factuality? Is factuality fiction's proper other? How does the notion of “nonfiction” inflect forms of mediation? What older cognate concepts for “works of truth” does “nonfiction” as a modern, industry term replace? 

[1]Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2011).  

[2]Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023), especially 67-85.

[3]Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).