Philip Gourevitch (Photo by Andrew Brucker) |
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
"Literature is just a fancy word for writing"
I applaud Philip Gourevitch’s recent post on newyorker.com
in which he says “there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world
that wants to exclude nonfiction from the classification of literature—to
suggest that somehow it lacks artistry, or imagination, or invention by
comparison to fiction” ("Nonfiction Deserves A Nobel," October 9, 2014). Geoff
Dyer made a similar observation in his 2001 review of Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Shadow of the Sun: “He [Kapuściński]
is the victim of a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the
loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction” (“Ryscard
Kapuściński’s African Life,” included in Dyer’s great 2011 essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition).
It’s time this prejudice was scrapped. As Gourevitch rightly
says, “Every mode of expression has its formal demands. For writing that’s not
fictive, that means fidelity to documentable reality; yet the best of it can
only be done when the writer has an imagination as free as any novelist,
playwright, or poet.” He concludes, “Literature is just a fancy word for
writing.” I totally agree.
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