English 120 - Writing American Lives

Sara Eddy

TTh 10:30-11:50 a.m.

In recent years memoir has become increasingly popular with American readers: authors such as David Sedaris, David Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and Augusten Burroughs have gained fame and fortune by presenting readers with sometimes salacious stories from their lives.  While these works may seem utterly contemporary, especially in their use of "naked" confession, they do not spring up unannounced: rather, they stand in direct relation to literary forbears dating back to the earliest Puritan typology and to a centuries-old tension between literary autobiography and memoir.  This class will take a semi-chronological tour through several culturally significant examples of American life-writing, ranging from Indian captivity narratives to slave narratives to works of American identity-formation,.  Our class discussions will attend to the conventions that have given structure to this genre; what differences there are between memoir, autobiography, fact, and fiction; what price a memoir or autobiography might pay for inaccuracies of truth; what audience, real or imaginary, a writer might be addressing--and what difference that audience might make in a writer's presentation of self; and to the formations of identity mapped in these works.