COURSE
DESCRIPTION:
This
course will demand 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,
political essays, celebrity autobiographies, cancer journals, 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
Facebook and blogs. You will write on topics that include food,
hair, money, illness, family, ethnic or racial identity.
As
we address questions of what autobiography is, we also 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 about yourself
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 have
social media such as Facebook changed our understandings of what constitutes
the self, and the line between the public and the private?
ASSIGNMENTS AND
REQUIREMENTS:
Short
writing exercises (~10%); participation in writing workshops (~10%); a minimum
of 20 pages of polished autobiographical writing (~65%); contributions to the
creation of an anthology of writings by the class (~10%); an
end-of-the-semester portfolio (~5%).
Attendance is mandatory; please do not sign up for this course if you anticipate
that regular attendance will be a problem.
TEXTS:
Readings
will be compiled in a COURSE READER or made available as PDFs on Laulima.