Excitement

...so who knows if this post is in the right spot. My user name is after my cat Rex, who is lovably large to say the least.

Speaking of lovable, I really enjoyed the Hampl piece posted--particularly in light of the few pages of "Factional Discourse" also posted for us to read. I found Zander's ideas on factional and fiction work to be interesting, especially in his assertion that the factional is in fact a more vague categorization than the fictional. We have heavily regulated and established over and over again what counts as fictional. Yet what is factional, as Zander points out, is open to argument and interpretation MORE actually, than fiction.

Hampl would agree with Zander I imagine, and would say that our memories (and memoirs) seek "to locate truth," (Hampl 31) instead of assuming that our memories are in fact the truth. Hampl goes on to argue that to write memoir is to attempt to claim authority so that one can question authority (Hampl 36). I love this circular idea that the power of the factional (memoir, in this example) lies in fact within the fiction (our embellishment of details). It seems from Zander and Hampl that one could not truly have faction without fiction, let alone tell the difference between factionalized fiction and fictionalized faction (Zander 406).

I look forward to discussing this more in class on Thursday!