Thursdays 12pm-3pm
Academic Building W 6010
Self-writing involves the simultaneous creation of a self and a text. Our seminar traces this dual process of creation in a broad selection of self-writing, from diaries and essays to confessions, memoir, autobiographical fiction, and documentary prose. We inquire about the relationship between certain notions of the self and narrative forms, while studying central questions of life writing: diary writing as self-training, narrative techniques that bridge fiction and non-fiction, the rhetoric of person, memory and trauma, gender and sexual identity, the narrativization of time and space. We consider examples of documentary prose in which the observing self is decentered. Our authors include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lev Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, Lydia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag.
By permission.