Archival Fictions: Plotting Forgotten Lives

Sunday, January 6, 2013: 11:40 AM
Napoleon Ballroom D2 (Sheraton New Orleans)
Jon Sensbach, University of Florida
"Archival Fictions: Plotting Forgotten Lives," explores the retrieval of the life stories of ordinary people from obscure sources as windows onto larger historical events.  It compares the liberties that writers of fiction and nonfiction may take in reconstructing such lives, and considers whether techniques for writing both forms can happily merge.