Extension
Activities
Extension Activity #1: Joyce Carol Oates’ take on James Frey
- An extension activity to the James Frey memoir could include more discussion of Joyce Carol Oates’ stance and commentary:
"the tradition of personal memoir has always been highly 'fictionalized' — colored with an individual's own 'emotional truth' — and that the James Frey memoir would seem to be in this category. It would seem that Oprah Winfrey was judging the memory from a more literal perspective, but this makes sense since the great majority of her readers would expect memoirs and autobiographies to be 'true.'" She says that she has never read Frey's book and that she chooses to write fiction because memoirs today "strain credulity." (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1648140,00.html?cnn=yes)
Was Oprah Winfrey right to judge Frey’s memoir according to what her viewers expected, or is there a universal ethics of right and wrong here? In other words, should memoir always be the literal truth? What do you consider to be what Oates terms the “individual’s own ‘emotional truth’”?
Extension Activity #2: Topics for Discussion and Exploration
Following is a long list of questions that address the ethical issues in this module. These questions may be used as the basis for classroom discussion or debates.
- What are the duties of a writer to represent reality and the truth?
- Is there a difference between fabrication (making it up), falsification (altering data) and plagiarism (using someone else’s words and/or ideas as your own)?
- Should a novel that describes a real place (a neighborhood, for example) be true to the reality? Is it OK to write that there’s a yellow drugstore on the corner of Madison and Washington, when in fact the yellow building is a Laundromat?
- Is “carelessness” in writing just carelessness, or more serious? In other words, what are the responsibilities of an author to choose the correct words and language?
- Would you agree with Plato’s argument in Phaedrus that “writing is dangerous because it can neither select its audience nor call upon its author to the rescue”? (Sean Burke, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/978074861/9780748618309.HTM)
- What responsibility does an author bear for his/her writing?
- “Author Ron Hansen suggested in a talk on "Fiction and the Ethics of Writing" that the Hippocratic Oath's promise, "First, do no harm" could be applied to writers as well as to doctors.” (Markkula Center for Applied Ethics http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/ron-hansen.html). Is there an ethics of fiction?
- Do misreadings of authors mean authorial recklessness, or is the reader responsible for meaning?
- JT Leroy, purportedly a former homeless addict and hustler, who had been prostituted by his mother, redeemed himself through writing. In reality, the author was a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert. What made "Leroy's" book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a hoax rather than simply a book by an author using a pseudonym? ((Markkula Center for Applied Ethics http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/ron-hansen.html)
- Binjamin Wilkomirshi wrote a Holocaust memoir which has since proved to be a hoax. Research the circumstances of Wilkomirshi’s memoir.
- NPR has a short program on “The Ethics of Memoir Writing” Talk of the Nation, January 12, 2006, in which guests explore the ethics of writing a memoir. Is it acceptable for writers to embellish the events of their lives to make a more exciting book? Students could listen to this at home, or in class. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5152136
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