Autobiography has been identified by American critics of culture as “the essential American genre, a form of writing closely allied to our national self-consciousness” (Jay Prini, The Norton Book of American Autobiography, 11). The course will focus on the affinities as well as the tension between the personal, the historical, and the national identities that this genre has initiated and continues to sustain today. Bearing in mind the origins of the genre in Puritan captivity narratives and accounts of religious awakening, we will read two full-length autobiographies as well as chapter excerpts from all the major contributors to the genre, starting from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and concluding with self-writings by Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Philip Roth. Beside the historical emphasis on the development of the genre in America, we will also explore a spectrum of theoretical questions related to textual representations of the self-created life, and the ideological and aesthetic purposes that such texts serve.

Texts:

The Norton Book of American Autobiography, ed. Jay Parini.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Everyman, Philip Roth

Written requirements: four short response papers and a final exam.