Exploring contemporary non-fiction

Aims

This course aims to:

• explore how different genres in contemporary non-fiction build their distinct worlds and shape their human stories
• ask how non-fiction has shaped contemporary culture’s ethical imagination
• examine the ways that contemporary non-fiction has drawn on the long history of the first-person narrator – the expert ‘I’ – to create ‘true’ stories that rival the novel

Course content

We will explore some of the ways that travel writing has opened up our curiosity about the world and other cultures. We will ask how nature writing has helped us navigate a rapidly urbanising society. Many contemporary true crime books suggest that the legal system is broken: we will ask how true crime shapes our relationship with the law – for good or ill. How does autobiography/memoir help us navigate our own experiences of grief, mourning, aging, change? How does autobiography/memoir help us imagine a life bigger, better and bolder (or quieter, smaller, more subtle) than our own? Why do we trust the non-fiction narrative ‘I’? are these stories ‘true’? And why do we read so many books about food? Recipe books were once hand-written volumes handed down from mother to daughter: why do we now we read food books written by strangers? We are looking for more than mere cooking tips: we want stories of how food makes us feel, what it means to recover lost recipes, how our relationships and imaginations are formed by feeding and sharing, making and eating.

What to expect on this course

We will be working with extracts from famous non-fiction books – true crime, travel writing, nature writing, autobiography and food writing. You are welcome to read the books in full but this won’t be necessary: I will provide the extracts for our daily discussion. For each discussion, we will start with a short reading before exploring different questions about the way non-fiction stories have been put together and the way the narrative voice and tension have been constructed. We will also look at some historical extracts to compare contemporary genres with their precedents. All contemporary non-fiction genres have very long histories: true crime, travel writing and food books from the 17th century used different techniques but the subject matter is surprisingly similar to writing today: we will compare some different historical approaches to voice and narrative and ask why non-fiction – then and, especially, now – rivals the novel as a form that shapes the ethical imagination of individuals and society.

Course sessions

1.  Travel Writing: working with extracts from contemporary travel narratives, and some small extracts from older forms in this genre, we will talk about voice, narrative, curiosity, readership, and ask how and why readers are so drawn to armchair travel (even if they also love actual travel).
 

2.  Nature writing extracts from today (and some from centuries ago) will open a discussion about what nature is, how we relate to it, rely on it, curate it, learn to love/hate it, and use it to help us make sense of that fact that, as modern people, we have become separated from it. 
 

3.  True Crime – who gets to determine if a crime has been committed and how it ought to be punished? Who would sit in court each day during a protracted hearing in order to understand the complex workings of the legal system? A non-fiction writer would – we rely on them to narrate such an experience so we can better understand what happens behind closed doors to people like us who find themselves entangled in the criminal justice system. In this session we ask why we as readers need someone else to do this work for us and why the person we rely on is so often a non-fiction writer.
 

4.  Autobiography and memoir: are these genres more true or less true than the first-person novel and why are we attracted to the intimacy of the genre’s narrative voice? Why do we trust it? What are we asking it to reveal for us and about us?
 

5.  Food Writing: even if you have never used a recipe book, you have enjoyed food writing in some form or other – cooking and eating seeps into so many other genres. The food-writing industry continues to flourish because something in our imaginations and our hearts responds to writing about how food is made (both locally and around the world), how it brings people together, consoles us when we are apart, shapes our annual traditions and collective beliefs, brings meaning in the darkness, shapes our memories and our attempts to reclaim lost heritage. In this session, we will compare extracts from food prose and ask how such an apparently simple genre can be so complex and subtle. 

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• identify the different non-fiction genre
• describe some of the ways non-fiction has shaped contemporary society
• understand your own responses to non-fiction genres and maybe come to love some you have never read before

Required reading

You will be provide with extracts for each week’s discussion but if you would like to read some of the books in full, these are four of our main texts: 

Berendt, John, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Random House, 1994)

Dalton, Chloe, Raising Hare (Canongate Books, 2025)

Didion, Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005)

Garner, Helen, Joe Cinque’s Consolation (Picador, 2004)

(multiple authors), In the Kitchen: Essays on food and life (Daunt, 2020)