2:30p-3:45p MW (15) 3 cr

TOPIC: TELLING STORIES ABOUT OURSELVES

Columnists tell us that we live in an age of memoir, and memoirs such as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (which we'll read) have headed The New York Times best-seller lists in the last few years. In this seminar we'll read some of the best--and most talked about--examples of this literature of memoir, autobiography, or life writing, as it is variously called. Why do people write memoirs? And why do people read them? What kinds of shapes have these writers both discovered and devised to present their personal experience in narrative? Inevitably, these first--person narratives are concerned with issues of identity and identity formation: How, they ask, do we become the "I's" we say we are?

For the major course project, I will invite students to write a personal narrative of their own, either about themselves or about others they know. If you are interested in trying your hand at writing personal narrative, this is the course for you. Alternatively, students may elect to write a long critical essay on one of the assigned readings. There will be an hour exam, but no final exam. Students may also be asked to report on a memoir that is not on the list of assigned readings.

The following synopsis is meant to suggest the range of topics and readings. Although the list is tentative, we will probably read many of these texts:

(1) brief lives and portraits: John Updike, "A Soft Spring Night in Shillington"; Grace Paley, "Travelling"; Ken Dornstein, "Where My Brother Fell to Earth"; Robert McCrum, "My Old and New Lives"; Chip Brown, "I Now Walk into the Wild."
(2) reconstructing a life: Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.
(3) gender and sexuality: Paul Monette, Becoming a Man .
(4) identity and the body: Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face .
(5) children and their parents: Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes ; Mary Karr, The Liars' Club ; Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II ; Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life ; Nancy K. Miller, Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death .
(6) siblings: John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers .
(7) fact and fiction: Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(8) ethics: Philip Roth, Patrimony; Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss; Phillys Rose , "The Music of Silence"; Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer .

If you are interested in this seminar and would like to discuss it with me further, please contact me via email ("eakin").