Truth and Dishonesty
What is our relationship with truth — as historians? As writers? How do shifting meanings and blurred genres factor into our ideas about the responsibilities and opportunities that various disciplines and forms offer us?
September 5: 2 Episodes of This American Life: #454 Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory and #460 Retraction: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction
October 2: Denis Johnson, Train Dreams: A Novella
October 25: David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster And Other Essays pp. 66-127
November 14: John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of An American Tradition…Socialism
December 4: Short Stories. Emma Donoghue, “The Widow’s Cruse” in her collection, Astray (NY: Little, Brown, 2012), pp. 41-62; Steven Millhauser, “The Wizard of West Orange,” in Salman Rushdie, ed., The Best American Short Stories 2008 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), pp. 158-86; Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story,” in The Things They Carried (Boston: Mariner, 2009; orig. 1990), pp. 64-81; Saki (H.H. Munro), “The Open Window,” in Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, eds., Short Story Masterpieces (NY: Dell, 1954), pp. 346-50.
Historians are Writers! 