Introduction to Literature: Creative Writing

ENG 273-002: Introduction to Literature: Creative Writing

Food Memoirs

 

Meeting days: MWF 11:30am-12:20pm Location: KUY 313

Instructor: Christina Nakyong Lee (leecn@hawaii.edu)  

Office Hours: M 10:00am-11:00am

Office Location: KUY 218  Appointment Location: KUY 218 or Zoom (via appointment) 

 Our class will meet in person. 

Course Description 

We have had a long history of writing about our lives, whether they be individual, collective, cultural, or familial. Arguably, since the 1980s and 1990s, the memoir has experienced a sudden boom here in the United States. In 2011, G. Thomas Couser argued in his book Memoir: An Introduction, that the memoir has become one of the most democratic genres in the United States. Coterminously emerging with movements such as gender, feminist, racial, and other political and cultural movements, as well as the rise of the digital age in which individuals began using internet blogs and social media to record their lives, the memoir has been and continues to be ever-expanding in both its form as well as its function. And I’d like for us to think about memoir not so much as a genre, but its functions, and how they represent the individual lives of whom Couser deems “ordinary people.” 

In this class, we will be exploring memoir in both form and function more generally, and slowly unravel the different modes of telling our life stories, notably through food. When we think about the term “memoir,” our tendency is to immediately think about a related term: memory. How do the different smells permeating from the kitchen or restaurants located in urban or rural spaces shape our experiences and thus our memories? What does the sound of the clutter and clatter of pots and pans remind you of? What tastes trigger certain emotional responses? And why are certain smells, tastes, sounds concentrated in specific areas? You’d be surprised at just how much food, its culture, and consumption reveal about our own histories, genealogies, and finally, place. 

As we comb through each text, I’d like for us to think about a few things: What does food and consumption mean on a social, political, and cultural level? What does it mean to be controlled by and to heal through food? Finally, what happens when food culture is shared? What are the limitations in terms of representation when we include the stories of people other than ourselves? 

In this class, we’ll engage in rich discussions about each text, explore their cultural implications as well as the limitations of “truth-telling” in memoir. Finally, we will be experimenting with craft as we write our own food memoirs. What does food reveal about our genealogies, our families, the places we’ve been and lived, and who we are? 

This class will be of particular interest to you if you are in or are planning to be in the creative writing and literature field. 

TEXTS MAY INCLUDE (tentative): 

  1. Super Size Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock 
  2. Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World (2020), Michael Pollan 
  3. Starvation Mode: A Memoir of Food, Consumption, and Control (2015), Elissa Washuta 
  4. Crying in H Mart: A Memoir (2021), Michelle Zauner
  5. Selected episodes from YouTube series: Best Ever Food Review Show (2010), Sonny Side

ASSIGNMENTS & PERCENTAGES MAY INCLUDE (tentative): 

  1. Attendance & Participation (5%) 
  2. Journaling (10%) 
  3. Oral presentation (10%) 
  4. Writing experiments
    1. Writing Experiment #1 (10%)
    2. Writing Experiment #2 (10%)
    3. Writing Experiment #3 (10%) 
  5. Portfolio + Reflection (35%)
  6. Final Exam (10%)