English 311(002): Autobiographical Writing
Channeling Your Places
Aristotle states that “place is prior to all things” (Physics, 208b, 34-5), and in this section of Writing Autobiography we will take this claim as our point of departure. Whether you are a four- or five-year visitor from elsewhere completing your undergraduate degree, a settler who now claims Hawaiʻi as home, or a Kanaka Maoli descendant whose family geneaology is intertwined with the history of Hawaiʻi through generations, your objective in this course is to let the places you have lived in or experienced speak through you. You will learn fundamentals of writing autobiography while responding to texts chosen to support your channeling of influential places in your life, composing weekly blogs that will serve as raw material for a formal twenty-page autobiography to be published at the end of the semester to the class website. Our course will be highly collaborative, requiring you to read and respond to the ongoing blogs of other students, read the texts that each of you have selected to inform us about your places, and participate in workshops at the end of the semester to render everyone’s autobiography publishable. All readings, whether chosen by the instructor or by students, will be scanned and loaded to Laulima, thus avoiding expenditure on texts. Instructor-chosen readings will be excerpted from these texts:
- Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
- Creswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction
- Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
- Hobbs, Catherine L. The Elements of Autobiography and Life Narratives
- Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
- The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (version tbd)
- hoʻomanawanui, kuʻualoha. “Ike ʻĀina: Native Hawaiian Culturally-Based Indigenous Literacy” (from Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being)
- Kennedy, Roxanne. “Humanity’s Footprint: Reading Rings of Saturn and Palestinian Walks in an Anthropocene Era” (from a special issue of Biography focused on posthumanism)
The structure of our course will be as follows:
- Weeks 1-6: Readings from the above texts, posting to Laulima, blogging, responding to blogs
- Weeks 7-11: Readings proposed by students, posting to Laulima, leading discussion of postings in response to student-chosen texts, blogging, responding to blogs
- Weeks 12-16: Workshops to perfect your places’ stories
Grades will be determined as follows:
- Attending All Classes and Participating through Posts to Laulima: 20%
- Composing Weekly Blogs: 20%
- Responding to Peersʻ Blogs: 20%
- Selecting a Text and Leading Discussion: 10%
- Channeling a Formal Twenty-page Story of Places and Posting to the Course Website: 30%
We will be building a learning community in this course, so perfect attendance and participation will be paramount. Absences will be excused only under exceptional circumstances. If you do not anticipate attending every class, please do not register for this section. Your grade will suffer significantly if you miss class.
Questions? jim.henry@hawaii.edu