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Online Creative Nonfiction: From Journal to Blog to Tweet
Perhaps the most common form of creative nonfiction today is the blog -- usually maintained by an individual, ideally offering regular entries, sometimes interactive, often including other material, such as graphics or video. Since 1994, blogging has exploded in popularity, and has evolved from the original online journal through a variety of forms to its present (and ever-changing) incarnations, including micro-blogging, such as is found through Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets.
This course will combine a history of online creative nonfiction with in-depth analysis of certain sub-genres of blogging (such as political blogs, military blogs, infertility and adoption and parenting blogs, travel, arts projects and ethnic-focus blogs). Students will conduct literary analyses of these texts, and also, as an integral part of the course, maintain their own blog throughout the semester, and we will consider issues of privacy, liability, danger, memory, and truth-telling within that context.
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Suggestions for similar course syllabi (it's a remarkably difficult subject to google, given the words 'online' 'internet' 'writing', etc.) would be hugely appreciated. And also any suggestions on critical readings -- I should have some time over the winter break, and plan to use it to bone up on any available theory that's been done around this subject. I may even go visit a library.
Also, I think I use the word 'blog' too much. I suspect I will be very sick of that word by semester's end.