Non-fiction: an unrealistic goal of truth telling

 Prezi Presentation

In our final presentation (Jacky, Sandra G, me) we decided to do a prezi and incorporate a starting point, quotations taken from our serendip conversations, images, and the 'landing' point that each of us experienced now that our non-fictional prose course has come to a close. As my landing, or perching place, I chose a quotation from Robert Coles' The Call of Stories. In it he says that, "the whole point of stories is not 'solutions' or 'resolutions' but a broadening and even a heightening of our struggles… (129)" I feel that this meshes well with the ideas that I put forward in my last paper about what it means to be a scientist. The story doesn't stop with the back cover of the book; each and every reader will gain something different or connect in some personal way to the narrative which will continue out of the literary world and into their own. Similarly, when we explore things in our own lives, the learning and connections shouldn't end with the answer to our first question. We need to continue: "well if this is so, then what is true if we put this and that together?"I feel like this shows what we did with our course. We started out with "non-fiction" and we defined and branched ourselves right out of that genre and ended up questioning truth and reality and deciding that there is no such thing as fiction or non-fiction because every account is biased and every fictional tale draws from real life experiences. This puts us in a corner; however I think if we just think as categories as guides (plus its hard to un-learn something we've been taught our entire lives) and remain healthfully skeptical (i.e. not as skeptical as Sagan but still questioning) then we as readers and learners will have the ability to enjoy and learn something from literature, all while keeping in mind the 'reality' and differences between any account and our own life stories. 

Thank you all for an excellent semester and a great continuation of some of the ideas and questions I began to develop last semester in Literary Kinds!