LITERATURE
Life Writing in the Twentieth Century
SPRING LN271
Thursday
Wendy Ward
It is often claimed that twentieth-century fiction is marked by an increasing self-awareness and reflexivity. Traditionally, autobiography carries an author’s intention to tell the truth, and while autobiography is far from being a new topic in literature, this course will spotlight and discuss different critical trends in autobiography and life writing over the last century including: the rise of fictional autobiography, literary journalism, creative nonfiction, graphic memoirs and more recently, fake memoirs. We will explore both fictional and nonfictional texts which represent lives or aspects of lives in order to rework the conventions of genre and form; thus, they often seek to record a life while, at the same time, interrogating whether there can ever be a comprehensive account of that life. Moreover, they spotlight the various ways the facts of a life can be represented, interpreted, bent and revised. Over the semester, we will examine texts that tackle many of these debates on genre, style, narration and the future of the literary form itself. The course opens by briefly looking backwards to Frederick Douglass’s landmark work for its narrative devices before discussing Johnson’s fictional portrait which continues the dilemmas of racial identity by capturing anonymity and passing in a modernist context. We then turn to how Jack Kerouac and Maxine Hong Kingston negotiate shifting gender roles and identity before moving on to the political dimensions of Joan Didion’s journalism and Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir. At end, the growing complexities of the self, language and autobiography as an ongoing art for writers like Philip Roth and Alice Kaplan will be addressed, and then concluding with more recent controversies raised by Aleksandar Hemon, Luis Urrea and Margaret Jones in their respective works.
| BELFIELD | ||
| 8 Thursdays | Jan 31, Feb 7, 14, 21, 28, Mar 7, 14, 21 | 7.30pm - 9.30pm |
| FEE: €155 | Print Open Learning Application Form 2012.13 or ring (01) 716-7123 for Laser/credit card payment |
Tutor Details:
Dr Wendy Wardreceived her doctoral degree from the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin, where she completed a thesis on the intersections between American fiction writers and the photographic culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Her primary research/teaching interests include twentieth-century American literature and culture, photography and visual culture, photo-fiction and life writing. She has been a Senior Tutor with the Department of English, Drama & Film for nearly five years, and has also taught on the evening degree at UCD.
Provisional list of key topics to be covered:
The Author as Subject
Truth Telling
Witness/Survivor Memoirs
Writing Political Lives
Mixing Fact and Fiction
Genre Conventions
Recent Controversies in Fake Memoirs
Who is the course for?
This course is intended for anyone interested in looking at the lines between fiction and nonfiction, and in particular, those students with an interest in re-examining narrative trends and genre conventions under the broader trajectory of auto/biography or life writing.
Reading List:
Following is the proposed reading list for this course. We recommend that you only acquire the book for the first class but do not purchase all the books listed in advance, as your tutor will discuss this list and how the course will be organised.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [excerpt only]
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [1912]
Jack Kerouac, On the Road [1957]
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior [1976]
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer [1979]
Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” Democracy [1984]
Art Spiegelman, Maus I [1986]
Alice Kaplan, French Lessons [1994]
Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno [2002]
Luis Urrea, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story [2004]
Margaret Jones, Love and Consequences [2008]
