Course Description
Exploration of the rich tradition of autobiographical narrative in America in a wide variety of settings and historical periods. The reading may focus on work written in any era, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, or center on particular thematic interests across the centuries.
Athena Title
American Autobiography
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students in this class will learn to approach one of the central nonfiction genres of modern times by bringing to bear the same tools of inquiry, analysis, and appreciation that they apply to prose fiction. What distinguishes the most vital autobiographical narratives from those that are of only passing cultural interest? How do the documentary goals of nonfiction complement or clash with the imaginative intensity that an autobiographer (like a novelist) often strives to achieve? Are memory and fantasy invariably intertwined in the autobiographer’s story? How does a writer impose aesthetic shape on the unruly nature of actual experience? In addressing these and other questions, the students will develop a keen awareness of the possibilities latent in the autobiographer's art. By the end of the term the student should expect to have deepened his or her familiarity with a range of writers that may include Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, W. E. B. DuBois, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Maxine Hong Kingston, Eudora Welty, or Tobias Wolff, among many others. Paper assignments will require students to produce up to 25 typed pages of expository prose, in short or long formats, and to respond to detailed editorial suggestions from the faculty reader with at least one significantly revised essay as a final product of the term's work. In some instances of the class, student autobiographical narrative may form part of the written output of the class.
Topical Outline
The course will take various topical forms, depending on the focus of individual instructors. Some versions may center on narratives of exploration or meditative immersion in the natural environment; others will stress stories of individual growth, of trauma, or of the experiential extremes of war or of disease. Still others could focus on autobiographical ethnography, on autobiography and gender, on autobiography and race. The focus could fall on narratives that illuminate great historical cataclysms or on those that stress private experience alone.
Syllabus