While supposedly normative for centuries, the single-volume printed biography or autobiography, usually accompanied by a claim to aesthetic, intellectual, religious, or political significance, has always been only one of many genres for life narratives. We will examine four modes of life writing with a large contemporary profile, but also a history as a mode, and extensive interconnections to other life writing genres as well.
Each mode will take up roughly a month in class time. The primary and secondary reading will be extensive. The class will proceed through a series of explorations of single texts or topics that provide an especially illuminating example of the interplay between genres, methods of production, and forms of life representation.
Mode I. Auto- and Bio-graphics—Lives in the Comix Mode:
For its texts, this portion of the course will focus upon the comics work of Art Spiegelman and the extensive public archive now accompanying Maus; Are You My Mother?, the second graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel; and contemporary popular forms of indigenous and subaltern representation, including Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic Book Biography and the graphic journalism of Joe Sacco. The critical and theoretical work will be drawn from edited collections, monographs, and essays by Scott McCleod, Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, Michael A. Cheney, and Hillary Chute.
Mode II. The Lifewriting Biz / The Memoir Boom:
The primary texts here will include Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs; a cluster of texts dealing with the life of Barack Obama, including his own memoir Dreams of my Father; and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, and Just Kids by Patti Smith. The critical texts will include G. Thomas Couser’s Memoir, Julie Rak’s Boom: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market, and various materials produced by organizations devoted to the support of would-be memoirists or trade biographers.
Mode III. Biopics and Life Documentaries:
Here the focus will be on a cluster of films emerging out of an extensive archive of print and other resources. Topics will include the many versions of Malcolm X as a metonymy for representation of American race history; the various encrustations upon the Clutter murders, all mediated through explorations of the personality of Truman Capote as novelist, non-fictional novelist, and protagonist; and the documentary The Stories We Tell, by Sarah Polley. Critical materials here will include work written and edited by Glenn Man and George Custen, and materials from Biography.
Mode IV. Indigenous Lives and Testimonio—Dueling Forms of Representation:
The main concern here will be appropriation, deployment, and blending of dominant life writing genres within the project of representing emergent or suppressed life experiences. The key critical material here will be drawn from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work on indigenous self-representation and re-appropriation of various modes of research that have claimed authority over narrating such lives—most notably, the ethnography and the oral history. Primary texts will include Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, by Lili‘ulokalani; a cluster of works about Joseph Nāwahī (Kahikina Kelekona [J. G. M. Sheldon] in translation, Noenoe Silva, Jonathan K. K. Osorio, and Biography Hawai‘i: Joseph Nāwahī [Chong-Stannard, Howes, and Kneubuhl]); and Jackie Huggins (Auntie Rita), as an example of collaborative oral history.
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One assignment will involve a critical and theoretical mapping of related creative, critical, and theoretical texts emerging from the selection of a single lifewriting work in one of the modes. Adaptations, reviews, commentaries, critical or creative responses, parodies—in short, students will create an archive of work in different genres in a variety of media that will situate the selected text.
A number of class presentations, in the form of ten-minute information and position papers in relation to one of the assigned texts, will take place over the semester. You will also be doing a number of reading response postings.
A final critical paper, approximately 6,000 words long, with an annotated bibliography, will be developed through consultation with the instructor. You will be doing an extensive report on this paper during one of the final two classes.
For doctoral students, we will also work on abstracting, and preparing the paper for submission to a conference, edited collection, or appropriate journal.