This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

How do memoir and memory construct one another? What distinguishes a genre that bleeds easily into autobiography on one side and fiction on the other? What strategies enable a first-person account to enlist the curiosity of strangers? Why and how do formal experiments disrupt a linear narrative sequence? These are some of the questions we will ask as we investigate both the evolution of a genre that begins with Saint Augustine and its diversification through the multiplying cultural filters of the present. Our readings will range across a spectrum of subgenres: the confessional memoir, the prison memoir, the queer memoir, the disability memoir, the immigrant memoir, the trauma memoir, and the graphic memoir. Our syllabus will include texts by St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Primo Levi, Eldridge Cleaver, Lucy Grealy, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Ruth Kluger. There will also be a course reader of essays about the neurophysiology of memory and the history and craft of a genre that has become pre-eminent in our times. Written assignments will include several critical essays and a first-hand exploration of the challenges of memoir writing through a brief creative undertaking.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills