Memory and Narrative: The Literature of Memory

3 units

Memoir is rooted in autobiographical fact, but it is also art. It selects, arranges, and sometimes exaggerates, retouches, or mythologizes its materials in order to bring out a deeper truth, define an identity, establish a public image, deal with trauma, or simply tell a better story. Writing about one's life is not only the next best thing to reliving it, as Benjamin Franklin said, it may also be an improvement upon it in the satisfaction it gives in bringing chaos to order. The course will explore the activity of writing the past in memoirs, autobiographical fiction, and autofiction, and consider how we understand the implications of each of these forms. Possible writers to be considered include Ayad Akhtar, Hua Hsu, Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro, John Updike, and Philip Roth. This writing intensive course fulfils the Twentieth Century and Later historical requirement