Topics in World Literature & History

3 units

Fabricate: To construct or build; to form by art or labor, sometimes implying the use of the imagination; to invent; to devise falsely; to lie. We will read the fabrications of some of the great and near-great autobiographers, including five or six of the following: Rousseau (Confessions), Franklin (Autobiography), Goethe (Italian Journey), Wordsworth (The Prelude and other poetry), John Stuart Mill (Autobiography), Edmund Gosse (Father and Son), Mary McCarthy (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood), and John Updike (Self-Consciousness). Topics will include the (re)construction of the self, the transformation of biographical patterns as they appear in fiction (Updike) and non-autobiographical prose (Mill), modern approaches to autobiography as a genre, and psychological theories of personality. During the last few weeks of the course we will study one writer, Ernest Hemingway, in depth, exploring the relationship between biography (Kenneth Lynn's Hemingway), autobiography (A Moveable Feast), mythicized or transposed autobiography (The Nick Adams Stories), and the novel (The Sun Also Rises and/or The Garden of Eden).