Psychobiographies
and Life Writing: Documents of Trauma/Myths of Recovery
Description. The focus in this course will be on two forms documenting psychological
trauma and recovery: the psychobiography (including auto-psychobiographies);
and “life writing” (including memoirs, diaries, journals, and similar trauma
writing). Students will read selected
psychobiographies and life writing (as complete or excerpted texts) and be
asked to consider how trauma and recovery are framed in these texts.
Assigned psychobiographic narratives, and related
theory will be considered in terms of how trauma,
its resolution and subjects’ recovery are represented in texts that utilize the conventions
of psychobiography. Similar questions
will be addressed concerning the assigned selection of life writing on trauma
and relevant theory. Students will consider the framing of trauma, its resolution
and recovery in life writing, which, across its genres, has more diverse
conventions than those of psychobiographies.
The salient question students will address of life
writing concerns how narrative framing can be regarded as self-generated in the
life writing process, and, if so, can this personalize the discourse of trauma
and recovery. A final question students
will consider is can life writing, as the subjects’ narrative reconstruction of
trauma, resolution and recovery, avoid psychobiographic claims of authority,
and succeed in opening readings of recovery as self-determined documentation,
mythic transformations toward recovering self?
Assignments
Two 5-page critical essays. The first will treat an aspect of
psychobiography (or auto-psychobiography).
The second will consider an aspect of life writing on trauma.
An oral presentation (15 minutes), accompanied by a
two-page summary, relevant to the student’s final research paper.
A three-page annotated bibliography relevant to the
student’s final research paper.
The final research paper (15-20 pages).
Attendance and Participation
Required Texts
Freud, Sigmund. Dora:
Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Frame, Janet.
Angel at my Table
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted
O’Brien, Timothy. The Things They Carried
Styron, William. Darkness Visible
Course Reader Theoretical readings including essays by
Michel Foucault, Sander Gilman, Susan Schweik, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
William Runyan, A.C. Elms, Suzanne Keene, Dan McAdams, Frank Ochberg, Cathy
Caruth and others; Excerpts of primary texts: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily
Dickinson, Kaye Redfield Jameson, Touched
with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament and An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and
Madness.Literary supplements to psychobiography: Emily Dickinson’s Lettersand selected poetry.