In our current era of the so-called ‘memoir boom’, public demand for personal stories has grown massively, an appetite met by an oversaturated publishing market flooded with celebrity memoirs and other accounts of intimate experiences such as trauma, grief, and illness. The contemporary period is thus characterized by an intense proliferation of life writing, an umbrella term that denotes texts and accounts which depict, record, and chronicle lives, or aspects and parts of lives, encompassing a wide variety of sources and documents, including biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, court records, lyric poems, and, in the digital age, blogs and social media posts. Such documents have long occupied a central place in the study of American literature, with literary scholars for instance focusing on early travel writings and accounts of the so-called New World (John Smith, William Bradford), captivity narratives (Mary Rowlandson, John Williams), spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives (John Bunyan, Samson Occom), as well as slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs). Shifting attention from these seventeenth- to nineteenth-century predecessors, this proseminar turns to contemporary American life writing, which is often characterized by genre hybridity and emerging forms such as biofiction, creative non-fiction, and autofiction, which unsettle boundaries between fact and fiction. Life writing continues to evolve in the present day as authors experiment with form, genre, and media, developing new methods of representation to capture the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life amidst climate change, globalization, late capitalism, social media, and artificial intelligence. This proseminar offers a survey of prominent and emerging genres of life writing (e.g. autotheory, autofiction, ecobiography, graphic memoirs) and aims to provide an overview of current concerns, debates, and approaches within contemporary scholarship on life writing. Throughout the course, we will analyze literary constructions of selfhood and subjectivity, discuss the ethics of life writing, and explore the different strategies of representation and meaning-making that authors employ to make sense of their lived experience.
- Teacher: Julia Von Bergen