Non-fiction Genre Research Articles

The Audio Description of Scientific Multimedia

Multimedia documents are increasingly used to disseminate specialized scientific knowledge. They are addressed to, and accessed by, different audiences: experts, students (with differing degrees of specialization) and general audiences. This range of audiences and products can help to bridge the gap between scientific communities and the rest of the population. Multimedia documents convey verbal and non-verbal information through visual and acoustic channels. The multiplicity of codes and channels both helps the acquisition of knowledge and allows for the inclusion of different types of accessibility resources, such as audio description for the visually impaired (AD). This article focuses on audio description of dynamic images in non-fiction scientific genres, including documentaries and multimedia presentations. It discusses current research on images, scientific translation and accessibility, analyzes existing audio-described documentaries, and proposes alternatives that can improve visual accessibility to multimedia scientific texts in different formats.

Beth Luey: Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge

Expanding the American Mind is a fine and fascinating study of popularization, a ‘‘subset of the nonfiction genre: the books that explain complicated subjects and ideas to non-expert readers.’’ Author Beth Luey is a formidably knowledgeable scholar and, one sees also in these pages, a wise one. Luey is the founder and was for a long time director of Arizona State University’s Scholarly Publishing Program. Scholars in the history of books or the study of publishing will find here nuggets they did not know, perfect examples they wish they had had the last time they lectured to the Friends of the University Library. General readers will reflect along with Luey on the remarkable—and remarkably recent—changes in the dissemination of books to many Americans. Luey’s study is in part an account of changes in academic knowledge production since there is no ‘‘popularization’’ until there is a body of specialized and esoteric knowledge, ‘‘something that is not popular to work from’’ (25). This emerged only in the middle to late nineteenth century when ‘‘the sciences and the secular humanities’’ established themselves as academic professions. If popularization depends on a body of specialized knowledge, it equally depends on the existence of a potential audience. Such an audience mushroomed in the post-World War II era with the G.I. Bill of Rights and the rapid expansion of college enrollments— from 1.6 million in 1940 to 12 million in 1980. Publishers catered to this market and made a notable contribution to it by moving into paperback publishing and inventing the ‘‘quality paperback’’ in the 1950s. Much of this story is familiar, although—in the tradition of popularization that Luey is analyzing here—she presents it compactly, gracefully, and authoritatively. She also provides some original and provocative analysis. In Chapter Six, ‘‘Writing To Be Read,’’ she subordinates the details of publication history to her own reading of popularized works of science, social science, and social policy. She offers us

Chained and Confused

This study focuses on how teachers enrolled in a graduate level, online English Education course perceived formulaic or thesis-driven student writing, commonly associated with the traditional “five-paragraph essay.” One goal of this course, “Writing, Reading, and Teaching Creative Nonfiction,” was to engage teachers in reflecting about the uses of this “new” genre in their own classrooms. Living in several states, the participants included one science teacher, four Special Education teachers, and ten middle and secondary Language Arts teachers. We analyzed 12 separate prompts posted to the discussion board over a six-week period. Also, participants were required to post one “thread” into each discussion board, with follow-up comments to threads from at least two other participants. Approximately 75 out of a total of 800 coded comments dealt with formulaic writing. The following patterns of participants’ perceptions emerged from these comments: (1) student benefits of formulaic writing; (2) a hierarchical sequence for teaching writing; (3) obligations to teach formulaic writing; (4) resistance to formulaic writing; (5) the constraints of formulaic writing on students; and (6) the constraints of formulaic writing on teachers. Based on this study, we recommend that teachers engage in writing themselves which includes risk taking, modeling writing and significant revision for their students, and sharing models of writing; ensure that their students write in many forms and genres, including, but not limited to, the five-paragraph essay; develop realistic views of the expectations and obligations they face daily; and internalize effective writing practices. In the process of exploring the genre of creative nonfiction, teachers also had to grapple with old debates, as almost all of this study’s participants changed their views, discovering that the chains they had felt actually were not as tight as they had originally believed.

Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics

Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics Eric Slauter (bio) Several recent revolutions (in the early-modern sense of the term) have brought change and cyclical rotation to the study of early American politics. New accounts of class conflict and democratization return to terrain first plowed by progressives like Carl Becker and Charles Beard a century ago. A new imperial history revisits central preoccupations of the old “imperial school,” which (from the 1930s to the 1970s) sought to understand the settling of North America and the coming of the American Revolution from multiple vantage points in Europe and the Americas. New comparative studies of the Atlantic revolutions, from the US and France to Haiti and Latin America, build on the conceptual grounds of R. R. Palmer’s now fifty-year-old volumes on the age of the democratic revolution. Everywhere, it seems, studies of institutional and electoral politics are back in style, necessarily transformed by those revolutions in social and cultural analysis that were designed to shift attention away from politics.1 But the study of early American politics has also undergone three revolutions that represent novel developments rather than returns to important topics or rescaled geographies. The first is technological. Manipulation of verbal data generated by the digitization of large collections of English-language texts printed in colonial British America and the US before 1820 is transforming research on early American politics in ways that have not yet filtered into the study of later American politics, in part because later periods lack similar collections. The second is methodological. Recent collisions between the history of the book and the history of political thought have generated new understandings of political communication that have largely not yet been taken up by later Americanists, perhaps chiefly because of field asymmetries. Although early American literary scholars put a premium on nonfiction genres, later Americanists privilege imaginative [End Page 301] writings; early Americanists concentrate on the culture of politics, whereas later Americanists concentrate on the politics of culture.2 The third revolution is ontological or categorical. It concerns what we mean by politics and it has transformed the study of both early and later American literature. The recasting of social or economic relations in political terms, the recognition of the political dimensions of cultural phenomena, the rise of studies of politics in journals of literary criticism since the 1960s are parts of a revolution that has fundamentally reshaped the objects of our attention, causing (or allowing) us to see politics everywhere. Something similar happened in the late eighteenth century, when the term “politicks” expanded in use and meaning and when ordinary people witnessed and participated in an increasing politicalization of everyday life. This revolution, fueled by democratization but distinct from it, is one of the most enduring legacies of early America, and the new technologies, methodologies, and changed assumptions about politics allow us to appreciate it better than we did or could before. 1. The Technological Revolution: Quantitative Cultural Histories Like much of the political writing of the period, Abigail Adams’s most cited letter, in which she hoped that the Congress would “Remember the Ladies” in drawing up a “new Code of Laws,” is a tissue of citations to other texts. “That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute,” Adams wrote to her congressman and spouse John Adams in March 1776, “but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend” (370). In a close reading of this letter published in 1999, historian Elaine Forman Crane noted that a nineteen-year-old in Philadelphia had written a similar phrase in her journal: “that men are generally tyrannical I will own,” Nancy Shippen Livingston wrote in 1783, “but such as know how to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender & endearing one of Friend” (qtd in Crane, “Political” 758). Livingston probably had not read Adams’s letter, and the phrasing was too close to suppose independent genesis; no doubt these two women read the same source. Crane engaged in a five...

Jeopardy: A Grandmother's Story

This article is written in the genre of creative nonfiction. It brings the reader into the dreaming, peridreaming, and waking mind of a grandmother whose normative expectations for her son's marriage and family disintegrate. It is neither an autoethnography nor a memoir. Its intents are (1) to unpack some of the consequences of an alternative child‐raising ideology on three generations and (2) to widen the scope of symbolic interactionist writing and theory by embodying the tenets of SI rather than talking about them.

Living in stories: creative nonfiction as an effective genre for writing about death and bereavement

Through the telling of stories and interaction with listener or audience, we give structure to our experience and create order and meaning. Written narrative is, therefore, a medium well suited to exploring the experience of death and bereavement. ‘We live in stories, not statistics,’ Gilbert says (2002: 223). Parents’ stories of their children’s deaths serve the same purpose as parents’ stories of their living children’s ongoing lives. Writing about the death of one’s child is a way not only to continue bonds and help other bereaved parents, but also a way to allow the ‘wounded storyteller’ to give voice to the dead and facilitate catharsis in the teller. Utilising the techniques of creative nonfiction to write such a story, the writer can create a compelling narrative that allows writer and reader to enter ‘the space of the story for the other’ (Frank 1995:18). This paper discusses the human affinity with story telling and the reasons the bereaved write their stories. It also defines the genre of creative nonfiction and outlines the history of its development. Finally it examines four creative nonfiction texts that have influenced my own writing on the topic of parental bereavement.

Creative nonfiction in electronic media: new wine in new bottles?

Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writing—something nowhere more obvious than in nonfiction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination, including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual textuality, this essay first notes some nonfictional genres and modes after which it looks the relations between fiction and nonfiction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.

Timothy Boon, Films of fact: a history of science in documentary films and television, London and New York, Wallflower Press, 2008, pp. xi, 312, illus., £16.99 (paperback 978-1-905674-37-4).

Films of fact by Timothy Boon mends what, up to now, has been a gaping hole in both history of science and media studies—an examination of the specific historical circumstances that determined how, in the twentieth century, science, technology, and medicine were presented to the British public in the form of the moving picture. Boon is Chief Curator at the Science Museum, London, and has published extensively on science, technology, medicine, and film. He persuasively argues that any appreciation of the contemporary public understanding of science requires knowledge of the specific circumstances directing the century-long liaison between science and the moving picture. His book amply demonstrates the intricacies of that two-way relationship as played out in twentieth-century Britain. Films of fact is structured chronologically, beginning with the one-minute film, Cheese mites, first shown in London in 1903 and proceeding through seven chapters to end in 1965 with the popular British television programme, Tomorrow’s world. Each chapter addresses a non-fiction genre (in some cases genres), analysing the larger scientific, technological, social, and cultural forces in play at the time. Through core chapters 2 to 5, Boon adroitly weaves the career of the eminent British filmmaker Paul Rotha. In each chapter, Boon presents his own insightful reading of key films and television programmes, the end result being a comprehensive analysis of science in British non-fiction film. ‘Science, nature and filmmaking’, the first chapter of the book, deals with the beginnings of scientific film in the 1890s as an experimental instrument for scientific and medical research. It goes on to map the science film’s move to theatre and music hall, where film techniques developed in the laboratory, such as microcinematography and slow motion, were presented to the general public in the form of “actualities”, combining the instructional capacities of images with their power to amaze. The next four chapters are devoted primarily to the documentary genre and Rotha’s key role in the development of scientific documentary. In the inter-war years, documentary was constructed by film pioneers such as Dzega Vertov, John Grierson, and Rotha, as a distinctive medium linking science and technology to the citizen and the state in such a way as to reveal the deeper social and political reality underlying the world of appearances. The documentary, utilizing the analytically sophisticated and emotionally literate film technique of dialectical montage, presented to audiences a highly aestheticized account of the ability, power, and responsibility of human beings to transform their world. However, Boon argues that documentary was shaped as powerfully by forces concrete and historical as by the idealist(ic) vision of its founders. In the ensuing chapters, Boon ably supports his argument through his examination of the interface between documentary and the social relations of science, the effect of the Second World War on documentary film production, and the stylistic evolution of the genre through the 1950s and 1960s. His lucid analysis of the development of the documentary mode through its specific historical relationship to science and technology cannot be summarized in a short review. However, one point (of many) worth noting is Boon’s warning that scholars’ too strict adherence to formalist definitions of documentary often obscure the historically contingent relations—between technology and work, science and citizenship, rationality and response—that determine documentary’s iconographic approach to its subjects. The final two chapters of the book document the growth of science in television, a process which variously continued, abandoned, subsumed, and superseded the subjects, techniques, genres, and politics of non-fiction film. A decreased stress on the social relations of science, an increased emphasis on representations of basic science, and the portrayal of science as a way of life and a culture in its own right are some of the trends highlighted by Boon in his analysis of the move to the new medium. Though Films of fact confines itself to British non-fiction film, the scope of its analysis makes it essential reading for historians of science and technology who wish to utilize film, and, by the same token, for media studies scholars who seek engagement with the scientific and the technological.

Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market

The last few years have seen renewed fascination with tulip, expressed in form of series of popular histories of flower. For these books, key in tulip's history is so-called Dutch mania of 1630s, when-we are told-a frenzied speculation in bulbs inflated their prices to unbelievable sums. Tulips, which could normally only be sold between June and September when bulbs were lifted from ground to be stored over summer, began to be exchanged in something like an unregulated futures market: promissory notes for future delivery of bulb were exchanged for promissory notes for future payment. The same bulb-buried somewhere in ground-could be exchanged ten times in day. When this speculative bubble burst in winter of 1637, traders were left holding fistfuls of worthless paper.1At least, this is story as it is usually told-and there are good reasons to doubt some aspects of it.2 I do not in fact want to focus on mania, but I do want to draw attention to these books and their accounts of it, not for historical truth of those accounts but for way they use flower to raise questions central to developing global market, whether in early modern period or in our own moment. The modern tulip histories appear as part of broader phenomenon of commodity histories, which Bruce Robbins has recently identified as a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction (454). According to Robbins's account, these commodity histories seek to narrate emergence of global capitalism as scene of seduction in which Europe is invaded, penetrated, conquered, rescued, seduced, and dominated by foreign goods. These stories invite us to witness the birth of European desire-that is, birth of demand (456). But tulip histories- left out of Robbins's account-also have their own particular logic. In them, we are invited to discover the birth of demand in of madness, mania: Michael Pollan calls it a brief, perverse moment (xxiv), collective (62); Zbigniew Herbert refers to collective, uncontrollable passions (41) and psychosis (47).3 These books endlessly recycle anecdotes about tulip bulbs becoming more valuable than houses or land. Such stories exert double fascination: they invite sense that world of stable values, in which land should be worth more than tulips, has been stood on its head; and they turn this reversal of values into an index of secret attractive power supposedly hidden in tulip itself but in fact belonging to operation of market and dimension of human fantasy that constitutes it. Describing madness of tulip market, these books solicit our recognition of market's power to assign fantastic values to what might seem to be trivial or ephemeral objects. After all, it is naive to be shocked at high prices tulip bulbs could command, since exchange value is function of market, that is, of desire: value represented by commodity, as Marx famously wrote, is purely social (139).The tulip histories focus attention on dimension of fantasy that underwrites operations of market, demonstrating that determination of value is always fraught process, perhaps even mad one. This is clearly an issue with powerful resonance now, in wake of series of booms, bubbles, or extending from cyberspace to seemingly more sober and solid ground of realty market. This emphasis might seem to trouble celebratory relationship to market that Robbins discovers in most popular commodity histories; to speak of bubbles and manias is to speak of market regulation, need for oversight, and irrationality to which judgments about value are subject.4 But seen from another angle, tulip books fall very much in line with other commodity histories, as Robbins analyzes them, and it is here that they begin to open up reality of tulip as it was constituted in early modern period as well. …

The “Truth” Behind a Scandal: Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Las muertas

Social criticism is central to Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Las muertas (1977). However, it is often overlooked that Ibargüengoitia’s novel can also be considered to be a parody of creative nonfiction, particularly of New Journalism. In Las muertas, Ibargüengoitia gives a humorous account of the infamous Poquianchis case (1963–1964) by drawing on the extensive press coverage which the case elicited. Ibargüengoitia’s borrowing of several literary techniques characteristic of the creative nonfiction genre serves to question its objective of factual accuracy and, in addition, condemn the sensationalist style in which the Poquianchis case was covered by the Mexican press. Ibargüengoitia’s literary attempt to uncover the “truth” behind the Poquianchis case did not impede him from taking artistic licence and adding a strong dose of irony to criticise the Mexican authorities involved in the scandal. His innovative fusion of journalism and literature results in a fascinating narrative which suggests authenticity despite substantial factual changes.

The ontology of a self-help book: a paradox of its own existence

The self-help book is celebrated as an iconic feature of popular culture. Indeed, as a non-fiction genre, the self-help book has become a global publishing success. However, the self-help book displays no recognition of its connection to a genre of writing, characterising itself as a singular, solitary text. This article engages a body of research and practice that has unproblematically assumed this normative, “self-sufficient” characterisation in its commentary of the self-help book. This article explores the self-help book as a textual form whose appearance as “self-contained” is deployed as part of a rhetorical strategy to invoke “reading”. It shows that the self-help book displays in its discourse an anxiety around this characterisation. This is unpacked by examining the self-help book through a paradox: on the one hand, reading a self-help book is characterised as the single requirement for its readers to fulfil their quest for self-help; while, on the other, that invocation of reading is in itself insufficient for self-help.

Editor's Foreword

Editor’s Foreword Karen F. Gracy In trying to describe what exactly constitutes the field of moving image archiving, I sometimes resort to the overused word interdisciplinary, because we often bring the knowledge of multiple disciplines together to work on the common problem of caring for the world's audiovisual heritage. Although our roots can most definitely be found in the nurturing soil of media history and theory, we have successfully grafted numerous branches onto our tree, including archival and museum studies, library science, art history, and conservation. Though we often borrow ideas, methods, and practices from one of these source disciplines, in the process of adapting them to the unique environment of moving images we often find them unsuitable for our own applications. The difficulties may exist in the physical or aesthetic qualities of moving image material itself, as audiovisual documents carry visual and aural information in a complex manner that is resistant to the type of analysis or categorization to which textual matter lends itself. For example, the challenge of digitizing analog audiovisual material to create surrogates that may stand for the original is much more complex than producing digital versions of most printed texts. Although one may say that there are now robust, reliable standards for the digitization of text, one cannot make the same case for moving images at this time. Complications may also be found in external factors unique to the moving image archival environment, such as political or economic issues that influence how we preserve or provide access to such material. Audiovisual archives often face hostile political environments that blunt efforts to protect material. Copyright restrictions for audiovisual material often trap film and video materials in legal purgatories from which archives [End Page vi] cannot rescue them. Furthermore, economic realities often make their own imperatives. In Sam Kula's work on the appraisal of archival moving images, he devotes a chapter to monetary appraisal.1 Archivists working in other environments deliberately do not engage in this practice, as it is considered a conflict of interest with their primary responsibility, that is, to assess the archival value of material. Yet in the moving image world, the fair market value of material often impinges upon archival value—decisions must take into account both assessments. Truth be known, the high cost of preservation work often forces archives, particularly smaller archives with miniscule budgets for audiovisual preservation, to preserve material that has proven to generate licensing revenue through user demand, rather than prioritizing exclusively by archival value. Should our appraisal models formally incorporate such economic concerns? If so, then we diverge significantly from the archival party line. As my brief example above shows, when we try to apply the concepts of a related discipline to our own work, we must test their fit for our own needs. In doing so, we make strides in fashioning our own histories, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies for practice. In this issue, several of the articles wrestle with the fit of tried-and-true models in the moving image archiving environment. Our first essay, "Framers of the Kept: Against the Grain Appraisal of Ephemeral Moving Images," finds author Timothy Wisniewski considering the appropriateness of traditional archival approaches for appraising moving images. Arguing that the positivistic model of evidential value poorly serves certain types of nonfiction film, he suggests that archivists consider a new approach to the appraisal of such moving image material, one that embraces the utter ambiguity of its values. Although many archivists cling to the concepts of neutrality and [End Page vii] objectivity in choosing which records to keep and which to discard, attempts to appraise moving images, particularly nonfiction genres such as industrial and educational films, resist such models, as their status as "records" is often contested. Arguing for an appraisal approach that bases selection on functional values—that is, how images have been created, used, described, and preserved—rather than evidential qualities, Wisniewski claims that the same qualities that make ephemeral moving images fail as positivist records—bias, falseness, lack of authenticity—also make them valuable as records of the strategies and functions that give rise to their creation. Ephemeral moving images possess archival value precisely in their ephemerality...

Stock Images, Filler Content and the Ambiguous Corporate Message

Stock Images, Filler Content and the Ambiguous Corporate Message

The Pleasures (and Dangers) Of Biography

The Pleasures (and Dangers) Of Biography Lori D. Ginzberg (bio) Alison Booth . How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvi + 423 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-226-06546-4 (pb). Sally Mitchell . Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. xiii + 463 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8139-2271-2 (cl). John G. Reid . Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian's Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xxiv + 228 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8020-8017-0 (cl). First, if I may, a confession. I do not like, and until recently rarely read, biographies. It is not that I doubt that there are good ones, or that I think biography is a lesser genre than narrative history writing, or that I dismiss the importance of individual women in making history. Mostly I find books that focus on the individual life too exclusive, too self-absorbed, and too packed with dinner parties; surely more tiresome than attending most parties is reading about them. And then, too many biographers fall in love with their subject and so, it seems to me, lose their balance. (Here I recommend Jill Lepore's article "Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography," whose self-deprecatory description of stroking "a lock of [Noah Webster's] hair in a tender embrace" in the archives made me laugh out loud.1 ) I learn too little actual history from most biographies—and too little about what the individual life really means in its time and place. I have heard the basic story (birth, the struggles of girlhood, the passions and limits of adulthood, death) before. I would certainly be far more bored reading about my own life than I am living it. I know many historians who share my puzzlement that people actually read biographies; more, that they love them. Indeed, as a child, I enjoyed the little blue biographies about explorers and thinkers and people who performed a creative act that changed the world (though I admit I skipped the warriors and never found sea-stories much fun). Something about the biographical narrative—about living in another's skin, about identifying with a person from another time, another world, about imagining oneself in a heroic moment—draws people as few nonfiction genres do. I do not really get it. [End Page 205] But I am researching and writing a biography, and so have embarked on reading dozens of them with an entirely new attitude. Certain preferences have inevitably emerged: I vastly prefer those whose authors do not love, or forgive, their subjects (Dan Carter's biography of George Wallace comes to mind2 ); I impatiently skim the ones with too many "important" guest appearances. Reminded of what historian Barbara Caine once called the "deep gulf between the biographical study of prominent feminists on the one hand, and the writing of the history of feminism and of women's movements on the other," I have been aware of navigating waters that are, at best, unfamiliar and, at worst, uncrossable.3 Feminist biography, Caine continues, while it tries to understand women in their place and time, necessarily focuses on people who transcended those constraints, who were exceptions or rebels or heroines. She points to collective biographies as a means of transforming the uses we can make of life histories. Alison Booth's How to Make It as a Woman contributes to this endeavor in important ways, both by exploring and explaining the pleasures people gain from reading women's lives and by illuminating the very act of compiling and honoring particular women's stories. Not itself a biography, it is a study of collective biographies (prosopographies) of women—those compendia of women's lives that sprung up regularly among the reading classes in part to celebrate, but as much to educate about, what women had, and therefore could, become. Booth's work teaches us not so much why people love biography, but what they are expected to learn, and teach, from the numerous individual stories gathered between a set of covers—or, in Booth's wonderful phrase, how "a...

Effect of Film Velocity on Genre Recognition

In this study effects of film velocity on genre recognition were tested. “Happy reunion” film scenes were taken from comic, action, drama, and nonfiction genres. Their speed was varied to result in 3 levels: original velocity, acceleration by one third, and deceleration by one third. Fifty participants judged the fittingness of all scenes in each of the 4 genres. Velocity proved to be an effective parameter in the recognition of the comical and dramatic genres but not of the action and nonfiction genres. As predicted, when a scene belonging to any genre was decelerated, participants judged the scene as belonging more to the dramatic genre (p < .01) and less to the comic genre (p < .01). Acceleration of a scene belonging to any genre increased its comical fittingness (p < .05). The role of prototypicality of scenes in the interaction with velocity turned out to be only modest. In a few cases genre crossings (i.e., confusing a scene's genre with another in recognition) resulted from velocity manipulations of nonprototypical but not prototypical scenes.

Incorporating Nonfiction into Readers’ Advisory Services

The readers' advisory world has seen a shift in the past several years from focusing exclusively on fiction reading to taking a broader view of recreational reading that includes nonfiction titles and audiobooks as well. This shift is a reflection in large part of the growing interest of readers in narrative nonfiction, as seen in the success of such works as Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, Dava Sobel's Longitude, and Anna Pavord's The Tulip. Librarians are realizing that they can increase their readers' advisory services and expand their community of readers by applying the same techniques that they have used to find new titles and authors for fiction readers to working with readers of nonfiction. In this essay, Abby Alpert examines the history of narrative nonfiction; discusses the current state of readers' advisory services for nonfiction readers, including looking at tools and techniques for working with readers; and makes some recommendations for future directions for this service. Abby Alpert worked as a readers' advisor for the Evanston (Illinois) Public Library for nine years. She is a 2005 graduate of the Dominican University Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and is currently working part-time in Readers' Services and Children's Services for Evanston. She reviews audiovisual materials for Booklist, and is working on constructing an online readers' advisory thesaurus. She is also beginning a book on graphic novels.--Editor. Now that the revitalization of traditional fiction readers' advisory is firmly established, publishing and reading trends require the readers' advisory community to turn its energy to expanding services to include new formats. These include graphic novels, audiovisual (AV) materials, and works of narrative nonfiction. Increasingly, nonfiction titles are being published, receiving positive critical attention, and becoming popular with the general reader. This has created both the need and the opportunity to develop readers' advisory services for nonfiction readers. This article will provide an overview of current practices in nonfiction readers' advisory, focusing primarily on narrative nonfiction, a style of nonfiction writing that adheres to the facts, but employs the literary techniques of fiction to tell a vibrant story about real events, phenomenon, people, and places. The intention is to look at the growth of narrative nonfiction, what is currently happening in nonfiction readers' advisory, and what needs to happen as narrative nonfiction is incorporated into the realm of readers' advisory services. WHAT IS NARRATIVE NONFICTION? To begin with, narrative nonfiction is not a genre itself; rather it is a style that encompasses any nonfiction genre or topic that emphasizes story, including biography, memoir, and essays. Hume proposes that somewhere between the newspaper on your doorstep and the novel on your nightstand lies narrative nonfiction. (1) At a conference focused on narrative nonfiction hosted by Columbia University, Yare, senior editor at The Atlantic, defined it as essentially a hybrid form, a marriage of the art of storytelling and the art of journalism--an attempt to make drama out of the observable world. He also said it harnesses the power of facts to the techniques of fiction--constructing a central narrative, setting scenes, depicting multidimensional characters and, most important, telling the story in a compelling voice that the reader will want to hear. (2) There are two elements to consider in looking at this type of writing: the Narrative and the Nonfiction. The narrative requires elements that go beyond merely reporting facts or technical or expository writing. How the story is told is as significant as what happened. The strategies of fiction writing are used to recount the development of an idea, to investigate a phenomenon, or to explore a piece of history The storytelling element necessitates scene-by-scene construction, drawing characters, finding a moving voice to communicate the drama, and conveying the facts in a way that will draw readers into the story. …

On the Borders of the Adventure Novel: Narratives of 18th-Century Travel in Indian Territory

I will attempt here to discuss and illustrate an instance, in the literature of travel, of the fluid, and overlapping relations that often exist between genres, and more particularly between fictional and non-fictional genres. The particular body of travel literature that I will be dealing with involves accounts of Anglo-American travel in territories still controlled (at least partially) by Indians in the 18th century. I will suggest that some of this material would qualify as a kind of “adv...

Resistance and the Pedagogy of Ethnic Literature

whole sobby immigrant thing is starting to get a little old and am having trouble feeling compasion [sic] for every story.... would enjoy a story of success, or something completely off personal level. These words are taken from a student journal entry made about three weeks into a course titled Literature and Moral Imagination: Fiction of Immigrant Experience in response to short story Eileen by Mary Gordon. We discuss moral, political, social, and economic issues raised by immigration in United States and examine fictional representations of that experience. Additionally, we consider question of why fiction is an appropriate vehicle for such content--that is, as opposed to reading other nonfictional genres such as memoir, biography, or history. While teaching this course, found myself puzzling over resistant, even hostile, responses, such as one quoted above, to a number of works we read for course; equally troubling to me as a teacher were my own resistance to and impatience with such responses. think of Flannery O'Connor's The Teaching of Literature, in which she cites response of a frustrated reader communicating a critique via O'Connor's uncle: Tell that girl to quit writing about poor folks.... see poor folks every day and get mighty tired of them, and when read, don't want to see any more of (131, my emphasis). As a serious teacher (in a nod to another of O'Connor's essays, The Tired Reader and Serious Writer), how should respond to this emotional and intellectual fatigue? In Empowering Reader: Literary Response and Classroom Learning, David S. Miail explores teaching methods that inhibit rather than encourage meaningful literary experiences. He concludes by speculating on benefits of negative response in literature classroom: Perhaps a part of function of literature is to arouse our negative emotions. It is obvious that negative emotions we feel in everyday life are much more likely to be suppressed than positive; they are socially less acceptable, and to express them might result in socially disruptive or damaging consequences ... [thus,] literature induces us to reflect on nature of such emotions, to explore their implications, and perhaps to rethink them in productive ways, within a symbolic context that is one remove from actual world.... If we thwart this process by clumsy methods ... perhaps we do so at our own peril. (476) Thus, in this paper present a number of speculations about both kinds of resistance (student's and reader's), as well as, hope, a number of workable, practical solutions to making resistance a useful tool in teaching ethnic literature. So, back to the whole sobby immigrant thing. When built journal requirement into course, set out very general guidelines, and told students to respond to whatever struck them about day's assigned reading. expressly encouraged them to explore their responses, even if negative--the only rule was that they had to examine reasons for that reaction. I really liked this story, or I hated this assignment, or This was so boring would not be acceptable. wanted them to get more critically involved with exploring their response to text, to uncover expectations, values, and assumptions that inform their reading process. resistance encountered to this requirement took several forms: outright but unexamined negative response, refusal to respond at all (this form saw also, as most of us do, in averted gazes and roaring silence during class discussion), or use of plot summary as a substitute for reflection and analysis. One rare exception to these forms of resistance was a young woman responding to Grace Paley's The Loudest Voice: OK, have to admit, this girl [Shirley, story's narrator/ protagonist, a six-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant who has been chosen to star in her school's Christmas pageant] was getting on my nerves by end of story. …

Commodity Histories

One striking characteristic of commodity histories, a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction, is a certain overkill in their subtitles. A representative sample might include, say,Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance(Warman),Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization(Gately),The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World(Zuckerman),The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug(Weinberg and Bealer),Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World(Kurlansky), andMauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World(Garfield). Only slightly less over-the-top than the “changed the world” clause, which also appears in recent histories of vanilla, house cats, Ping-Pong balls, dishwashing liquid, and pocket lint, is the vogue for two-word titles in which an adjective, usually a commodity-identifying color, is paired with the most coveted of precious metals. Some examples areBlue Gold(water [Barlow and Clarke]),White Gold(rubber [Yungjohann]),Black Gold(oil [Woodward]), andGreen Gold(tea and marijuana—two books [Bennet; Macfarlane and Macfarlane]). Such titles suggest that all these commodities, even the humblest, have the power to get continents discovered, dynasties toppled, mountains moved. We take some of these commodities for granted, but all of them have changed the world.

Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery (review)

Reviewed by: Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery Wendy Rawlings (bio) Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery By Patricia FosterUniversity of Georgia Press, 2004177 pages, paper, $18.95 "Anything may happen when womanhood ceases to be a protected occupation." So says Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, her great book about the challenge and necessity of writing as a vocation for women. Reading Just Beneath My Skin, Patricia Foster's collection of linked essays that trace the author's journey from small-town Southern girl to writer who lives by her own rules and wits, one senses Foster would agree. Like Woolf, Foster takes up the subject of the struggle to free womanhood from protected status, citing her own experience of growing up hemmed in by the narrow definition of womanhood in the South. "Like many girls, I learned to defer, to apologize, to say what was expected in words that tiptoed into a conversation, barely touching their heels to the floor," Foster laments in "Goody-Goody Girls," the last of four essays in which Foster chronicles her life before she discovered the powerful tool of autobiographical writing. Once she discovers writing, the move Foster makes, both literal and metaphorical, is from "Inside the Girls' Room" of the book's first section to "Inside the Writing Room" and, finally, "Inside My Skin." She wants to "think about autobiography as both a genre and a process, think about writing as an act of faith as well as a road to self-discovery." In doing so, she acknowledges criticisms leveled at the current glut of memoirs published—"that memoir is so much navel gazing, narcissistic indulgence." Foster, who teaches in the MFA program in nonfiction at the University of Iowa, makes [End Page 182] an eloquent argument for the necessity of memoir. The contemporary memoir takes as its subject not merely the individual experience of one person, but implicitly, Foster claims, the great estrangement and alienation we suffer in a society no longer organized around familial or communal bonds. In this way, the genre functions to "diagnose the culture's ills" by giving a shape to the inchoate sense of our loss of community in the twenty-first century. I am in many ways convinced by Foster's impassioned defense of the memoir form. It rings true to my own rich experience of reading Bernard Cooper's Truth Serum, a reflection about gender identity through the eyes of a man who grew up gay and Jewish in California; or Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, an account of his poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick that's as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. But Foster's recollections, which take up more of the book than her meditations on memoir as a genre, don't illuminate her own life the way her insights about memoir illuminate the merits of the genre. There's an air of grievance that taints nearly every recollection in this book with the language of victimization. "I don't think of fury as toxic. Instead, it's a resource, a wake-up call," Foster asserts, in one of many sentences that borrow from the rhetoric of that other oversubscribed nonfiction genre, self-help. Foster refers to the current preference in academia for nonfiction characterized by fragmentation and obscurity and sets this aesthetic in opposition to her own, the personal story told by an "I" narrator with clarity and insight. Yet outside of a few classrooms on the plains of Iowa (or 'neath the kudzu in Alabama, where I admit to teaching the occasional experimental piece of creative nonfiction in a graduate writing course), the kind of memoir Foster champions is alive and well. It's not the stylishly obscure nonfiction piece that threatens the health of the memoir form, but the indulgence of the "Adventures in Self-Diagnosis" impulse that drives enterprises like Dave Pelzer's wildly successful Boy Called It series, in which he catalogues a litany of abuses that were allegedly the substance of his childhood. Foster doesn't indulge in anywhere near the therapeutic excess that characterizes Pelzer's work, but there is a disturbing dependence in Just Beneath My...