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Kölling, Angela: Writing on the Loose. Reading Florian Illies’s Generation Golf,
Maurice G. Dantec’s Périphériques, Joschka Fischer’s Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst, and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World as examples of creative nonfiction
(Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, Band 171)
ISBN 978-3-89693-560-1 (02/2012)
248 Seiten, 22 x 15 cm, Kt., EUR 39,00
A journalist writes a book about his generation, based on the advertising campaign for a car. A genre noir writer voices his political and literary ideas in the style of his fictional anti-heroes. A politician supports his career with personal reflections about his weight loss campaign. A French novelist writes a 9/11-autofiction. These authors’ works are just samples of the many directions autobiographical literature has taken in Germany and France after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the books share a link with autobiography, they would not be found in the same section of a bookstore or library – nor would a literary scholar group them as belonging to one and the same genre.
Focusing on the way in which the selected texts combine belletrist endeavours with political argument, this study shows that Illies, Dantec, Fischer and Beigbeder utilize a literary approach to factual writing known as “creative nonfiction.” It demonstrates, through close examination of the four books, that creative nonfiction has grown out of the confines of 1960s and 1970s Anglo-American New Journalism, and has evolved into a valuable framework through which to explore fresh links between literature and politics in the emerging and diverse forms of new European writing.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Bewildering Years: Why Study Creative Nonfiction?
Structure and Contents
Notes on Primary Materials,
Secondary Sources and Translation
Chapter 1: Towards Defining an Amorphous Genre
1.1 Origins: The Emergence of Creative Nonfiction in a Time of Civil
Disobedience
1.2 From Moment to Movement: Creative Nonfiction after the 1960s
1.3 What Makes Creative Nonfiction (Creative Nonfiction)?
1.3.1 “Like a Novel”: The Literary Elements that Make
Creative Nonfiction
1.3.2 The ‘Big Five’ of Creative Nonfiction: A Comparison of Definitions
1.3.3 ‘The Private’ and ‘the Public’ in Creative Nonfiction: Trends
1.4
Problems of Defining an Amorphous Genre: A Possibility of Transfer
Chapter 2: The Magpie’s Song: a Working Definition of Creative Nonfiction in Seven Dynamics
2.1
A Remix of Sorts
2.1.1 Fact-Fiction Dynamic
2.1.2 Writer-Reader Dynamic
2.1.3 Sympathy-Antipathy Dynamic
2.1.4 Good-and-Bad Dynamic
2.1.5 Life-Art Dynamic
2.1.6 Writing-and-Righting
Dynamic
2.1.7 Self-Other Dynamic
2.2 An Invitation to Four Conversations
Chapter 3: Florian Illies’s Generation Golf: Literary Journalism or Pop-literature?
3.1 Problems of Pop and Pop-literature
3.2 Documentary and Literary Elements: How the Fact-Fiction Dynamic in Illies’s Writing Connects Generation Golf to the Generation Debate and Douglas Coupland’s Works
3.2.1 Generation X, Generation Golf and Shampoo Planet
3.2.2
Rebellion against Form: the Playmobil Biography
3.2.3 “A Sign-World that Reaches into the Everyday” (mix of High and Low Culture Elements)
3.3 Autonomy and Interdependence in Generation Golf – Reflections on the Contract, the Empathy and the Critical Perspective the Author Establishes by Literary Means in the Text
3.3.1 Illies’s Contract with the Reader
3.3.2 Cynical Affirmations
3.3.3 Ironic Refraction
3.4 The Incessant Repetition of the Ever-Same and the Ever-New: the Timely and Timeless in Generation Golf
3.4.1 Die Vorgängergeneration (The Preceding Generation)
3.4.2 “It Keeps Running and Running and Running”
3.5 The Origins and Spread of Generation Golf
3.6 Imagining Generation Golf: Branding Identity
Chapter 4: Other Voices in Maurice G. Dantec’s Périphériques:
Creative Nonfiction and the Public Intellectual
4.1 The Fiction, the Author and the World
4.2 Other Voices: the
Editor
4.2.1 The Preface
4.2.2 The Interview
4.2.3 The Structure
4.3 Fact and Fiction – One Dynamic Network of Texts
4.4 Evolution by Literary Means: the Bibliothekon
4.5 The Fiction
of the Writer – Effects on Identity
4.6 Creative Nonfiction with a False Bottom: the Origin and Spread of Paradoxical Authorship (A Comparison)
Chapter 5: Self-exposure and Self-maintenance in Joschka Fischer’s Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst (My long run to myself)
5.1 Fischer’s “langer Lauf”
5.2 What Kind of
Story?
5.3 The Fictional Credibility of Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst
5.3.1 Fischer’s Clashes with Society: a Win-win Situation between the Politician and the Media
5.3.2 Fischer’s
Self-reflections and the Imagination of Human Agency
5.4 Public Confessions as a Way of Shaping Identity – “on and by the media”
5.5 The Door to a Room of One’s Own: Creative
Nonfiction, Autobiography and Late Modern Politics
Chapter 6: Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World: A Historical Novel
6.1 Writing after 9/11: Reviews of Windows on the World
6.2
The Novelist as Historian
6.2.1 The Novel Form
6.2.2 Criticising Other Media
6.2.3 The Ambiguous Protagonist
6.2.4 The Point of View
6.2.5 The Use of Time
6.2.6 The House of Mirrors
6.2.7 The
Collective Novel
6.2.8 The Observer’s Archimedean Point
6.3 Catcher in the Windows: a Similar But Different Approach to History as a Novel
Chapter 7: Conclusion
7.1 Why Study Creative
Nonfiction in Germany and France?
References
Acknowledgements
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