Confession, Autobiography, Testimony

Does writing a life give it coherence and veracity, or create a fiction? What is the relationship between first-person narrative and truth, and between authorship and authority? How does the form of a first-person text -- a religious confession, a personal journal, a political denunciation, a collective memoir -- affect the telling? Must the reader of such an account be "you" to the teller's "I", and how does the intimacy of this relationship shape the experience of reading? In this course, we test the limits of self-narration against ethical and physical limits, reading first-person narratives that purport to be non-fictional. We will read accounts of different experiences -- social and sexual transgression, suffering and perpetrating violence, slavery -- and explore both the possibilities and duplicities of writing as "I".