A&H 237 Life and Travel Writing

Content

The course is devoted to various forms and modes of autobiography, in literature and popular culture: memoir, diary, personal essay, interview, auto-ethnography, blog, oral history, trauma narrative, visual life narrative, and autobiographic forms of travel narrative. It prepares students to read and critically analyse various life narratives, as well as autobiographical modes in popular culture. In this way it develops in them an awareness of postmodern ‘culture of autobiography’. 
The students will refine their writing, presentation and academic debating skills. What is important, they will learn using literary analysis to refine skills of intellectual self-reflection. They will be invited to approach their own subjective experience in a meaningful and functional way, applying concepts from autobiographical, gender and postcolonial theories.

With its broad analytically scope, and attention to literary forms as part of larger cultural processes, the course ideally fits into the paradigm of liberal arts.

Instructor

Dr. Ewa Ignaczak

Track

Literary Studies

Period

Spring / 2012

Course Material

• Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography, University of Minnesota Press
• Roorbach, Bill (ed.). 2001. Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth. Oxford University Press
• Hoffman, Eva. 1989. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. Penguin
• Kalder, Daniel. 2007. Lost Cosmonaut. Faber and Faber 
  

Prerequisites

One needs to have followed one of the following courses in order to take this course:

• A&H 135 Great Literary Works
• A&H 136 Introduction to Literary Studies
• A&H 236 The Rise of the Novel

Additional Prerequisites

Or by the instructor’s agreement

Required for

This course is an alternative requirement for the following courses:

• A&H 336 Critical Perspectives on Literary Meaning
• A&H 337 Film and Text
• A&H 387 From Buffalo Bill to Dr. Phil: American Culture at Home and Abroad
• SSC 334 Advanced Cultural Studies