Non-Fictional Prose

The plan that I have for the rest of the semester includes looking at autobiographies of people under different circumstances and people in different periods in time. I would also like to look into documentaries that reflect either the life of a whole population or the experience of one person. I would be interested in focusing on either feminist film documentaries or conflict zone documentaries. The conflict zone documentaries usually involve a lot of emotion and can be partially biased, which might distort the truth and reality. I am also very interested in looking at journalism as a medium of reporting the truth.

In the Ecology of Wisdom we discussed some major issues with the wording and its connotation it has and the thoughts that are evoked based on that connotation. A good example of this is portrayed throughout the book in “deep” and “shallow” ecology. Those terms give a hierarchy to the terms and to the people who practice it. No one wants to practice shallow ecology because it seems to be superficial and self serving rather than a direct attempt to help the environment. It evokes the feeling that you only want to help the environment because you want to make life better for yourself and increase your quality of life, rather than doing it because it is right or better for the trees, plants, etc.

A possible course outline for the final 6 weeks should explore the multiple ways that non-fictional prose can be written. I think continuing our exploration of the different possibilities available to us will be beneficial because we have already seen such amazingly distinct methods of composing (Bechdel's tragiocomic to Shield's). I think that seeing more of this variation will broaden our horizons so I chose books that interest me, but are written differently and cover different topics.

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Our coursework so far has given us a smattering of samples across the nonfiction genre. We've dissected graphic memoirs, criticized criticisms of copyright law, tried to define the nature of reality in a genre that is (let's face it) not exactly real. In light of this, I think it would be interesting to look at reality from a scientific and psychological perspective. If something is a work of creative nonfiction but focuses on scientific "facts," what does that work become (faction? fiction?)? Or if a work focuses on a specific case or example - an isolated incidence - , can it be a "factual" representation of an illness or phenomena as a whole?

 Though I could easily nitpick the entirety of Naess' The Ecology of Wisdom, I am only going to do as much with his essay, "Population Reduction: An Ecosophical View." Naess starts with a true enough observation: that we, the human race, have overpopulated this planet to the detriment of our ecosphere. Logically he says, we must then work on reducing our population over the next few centuries, despite that current politics advocate doing otherwise. He states that "[o]n average, no very great population is required of each culture . . . [and that] huge numbers tend to reduce the manifold" (304). So by increasing our population, we not only destroy the environment, but our cultures as well (more people lead to more fractures).

After Tuesday’s discussion, I read some more of Naess’s essays with the thought that he was writing with the idea that his environmental outlook was better than everyone else’s, or that he was trying to indoctrinate people into his way of thinking. However, while reading the essay about Tvergastein I found that he was simply expressing his own profound respect for nature and sharing his ideas about why this respect is important.

We started class by disussing some of the posts people made since the last class on A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

I liked Solnit's book. It speaks really strongly into my own understanding of the brain and the mind and the ways in which we learn. A lot of us feel uncomfortable when we get lost, literally or metaphorically. While I'm not going to lie and say that I enjoy wandering around strange places when I have a destination in mind, I do often go for walks into unknown areas around Bryn Mawr. I like looking at the environment around us, both the natural and cultural aspects of it, and I like snooping on the massive houses around here.