DESCRIPTION: In this course, we will consider questions such as the following: Why do you want to write autobiography, and what strategies will best enable you to fulfill your purposes and motives? What are the ethical issues involved in deciding whether or not to write and publish stories that might shame your family or violate their privacy, and what are some ways autobiographers are able to preserve the privacy of those whom they might want to protect? To what extent is the story that you tell determined by the genres and cultural narratives available to you? If you’re interested in challenging or revising these narratives, to what sources can you turn? Does writing autobiography necessarily entail valuing individual or purely personal concerns over more communal social or political ones? If and when is it okay (or is it ever okay) to lie? What constitutes lying? How has social media changed our understandings of what constitutes the self, and the line between the public and the private?
As we engage such questions, we will do a lot of reading and writing. We will experiment with different ways of writing autobiography by using the course readings as models, and we simultaneously will explore issues, problems, and questions that these readings raise about writing autobiography. I’ve based the readings for this course—and the kinds of writing you can do for it—on a broadly defined understanding of autobiography. I hope that the wide range of reading and writing will invite discussions about how to define autobiography, and what’s at stake in struggles over definition. Our readings will include not only more traditionally literary forms of autobiography, but also a sampling of texts often labeled as ethnography, political propaganda, sociology, or popular culture—our readings will include, for example, testimonio, online dating profiles, victim impact statements, political essays, interviews, , and also autobiographical narratives that defy disciplinary and genre boundaries as they make use of cookbook recipes, dreams, letters, diaries, poems, journal entries, legal documents, and academic scholarship. The class will also include a consideration of autobiography in relation to writing happening through Instagram, dating apps and blogs. You will write on topics that include, for example, food, fashion, money, illness, family, ethnic or racial identity.
This course satisfies Breadth of Field. Designations include Creative Writing. It also fulfills a “W” requirement.
The class meets in-person.
CW: Both the readings assigned, and those that your classmates might share, might include descriptions of sensitive or disturbing topics , so please be ready for this in taking this class. We will work together to develop a set of best practices and guidelines that allow for (but do not require!) the exploration of difficult topics and that help create a community of care in the classroom.
TEXTS: I will provide you with a variety of life writing texts that will be posted to Laulima.
ASSIGNMENTS: short writing exercises; participation in writing workshops; large group workshop; a minimum of 20 pages of polished autobiographical writing; contributions to the creation of an anthology of writings by the class; an end-of-the-semester portfolio; reading questions.