4:40p-5:55p MW (30) 3 cr

TOPIC: TOPIC: SLAVERY, RECONSTRUCTION, AND AMERICAN MEMOIR

This course will explore the relationship between personal memoir and national history. How have writers imagined "America" when telling their own life stories? How have they done so when writing about two of the more troublesome, more difficult to memorialize aspects of national history: slavery and Reconstruction? How do memories of these episodes differ from writer to writer? How have they changed over time? We will address these and other questions by focusing on seven memoirs, starting with Harriet Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative and ending with Edward Ball's recent best-seller, Slaves in the Family, which is based on the personal stories of Ball's own slaveholding ancestors. In between we will read such texts as Frederick Douglass's Life and Times (1881) and Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), which remember slavery and its aftermath in different ways. We will also read one memoir disguised as fiction (Joel Chandler Harris's On the Plantation) and one work of fiction disguised as memoir (James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man). We will supplement our reading with several shorter texts and with two films, The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.

The course should provide useful ways of thinking about memoir as a narrative form, a cultural artifact, and a political device. It will also provide students interested in American literature a background for better understanding 19th- and 20th century literary texts, from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Moby Dick to Invisible Man and Beloved.

Graded work will include several short quizzes, a report on a supplementary text, a longer final paper, and a final presentation based on your research.