Bureaucracy and other stories
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Abstract
The following project is the product of three years of intensive research and trial and error. You’ll notice it’s divided into two sections: fiction and nonfiction. However, one of the research questions central to this project is: What are some of the reasons such genre differences matter? What follows aims to trouble the line between the two categories. Ultimately, the main difference, this project argues—indirectly—comes down to the expectations readers bring to the table, based on the way a given piece is presented, packaged, and/or framed by the writer, editor, publisher, platform, etc. There are no essential differences between the two genres, in other words. If a piece is presented as nonfiction, there are certain assumptions in play, on the reader’s part, and it makes sense to hold the writer to certain standards of accuracy and accountability that don’t necessarily obtain in fiction. However, oftentimes fiction is more rooted in the real world, in actual people and events, than we realize. And nonfiction, of course, often relies on many of the same narrative devices and dramatic conventions that fiction does, even if we don’t always think of nonfictional accounts as being shaped, constructed, or embellished. Anyway, I hope this project represents a valuable, if small, contribution to ongoing discussions about the limits and advantages of conceptual divides like those between “real” and “invented,” “found” and “made.” Categories like these matter, in part, because they have ethical and political implications: they affect how we go about trying to separate truth from falsehood, right from wrong, just from unjust, and the fixed/given/static from the changeable/contingent/fluid. Ultimately, the difference between “things in the world,” on one hand—the stuff of life—and “things about the world,” on the other—the stuff of art—is, I think, more of a difference in degree than in kind. Narrative helps us see and engage with the world in new ways. And the world itself is always to some extent filtered through the stories we use to organize (and reorganize) it—regardless of whether or not such stories are explicitly “creative” or “literary.
Table of Contents
Critical Introduction -- Part 1. Fiction. Stand Tight ; Time of My Life ; Audio Triangulation ; Prayer for the Dead ; Desperate Measures ; The Final Analysis ; Bureaucracy -- Part 2. Nonfiction. 39th Street, KCMO ; Pre-production Notes ; Photographic Destiny ; Soul Searching
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M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts)