La situación y la historia

In this masterful book, Vivian Gornick gives us all her wisdom about the art of writing, distilled through years of teaching at American universities, and focuses on personal narrative, that which originates from the author's own experience. Where so many others preach that beginning writers must focus on perfecting technique and style, Gornick argues that only a narrator who intimately knows what he is telling will be able to convey truth, and that the key lies in knowing "who is speaking, what is being said and what is the relationship between the two things. How can we extract from one's own life experience a story that deserves to be told, that provides whoever reads it with some wisdom? That is the question posed by The Situation and the Story, and she proposes finding the answer in some of the best autobiographical essays and memoirs of the last hundred years. Led by Vivian Gornick, we will read authors as diverse as Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, George Orwell and Marguerite Duras, whose works sink into their personal experience but transcend it, enunciating deeper truths about the world in which we live.