 From Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi. |
Michael K. JohnsonEnglish 367: American Autobiography, Fall 2005Meets1:25–2:15 MW/Roberts 203 Required texts
|
This course will provide an overview of American autobiographical
writing from the earliest practitioners in colonial America to recent
work by contemporary writers. As the course progresses, we will discuss
the way the construction of the author's persona (the autobiographical
"I") reflects shifts in historical understandings of the concept of
selfhood, and we will foreground a discussion of the impact race,
ethnicity, and gender have on the author's representation of the story
of the individual life. We will also examine a variety of forms of life
writing from classic (confession, memoir, conversion narrative,
captivity narrative, slave narrative, and self-made man plot) to modern
and postmodern autobiographies that experiment with narrative voice and
that depart from the traditional prose memoir form by emphasizing other
genres (such as poetry) or other art forms (drawing, cartoons,
photography). One of the primary objectives of the course is to examine
the writing of a wide range of autobiographers whose work reflects both
the diversity of the American experience and the flexibility of the
genre of American life writing. As a way of pushing the envelope in
terms of what kind of texts we can legitimately study in a literature
course, we will watch a film of comedian Margaret Cho's
autobiographical stand-up concert, I'm the One that I Want. Can
we claim as an American autobiography a piece of writing that is
"performed" rather than printed in book form?
For those of you who have completed English 181 (Literary Analysis and Interpretation), you will find that English 367 continues to emphasize the techniques of "close reading" and formal (or aesthetic) analysis that you were introduced to in the earlier course. As the course progresses, I will introduce several additional methods for interpreting texts. The field of American studies as it is configured here in the twenty-first century is notable for the wide range of methods that scholars, critics, and students employ as a means of making sense of the various texts that Americans have produced. We will use insights from feminism and ethnic studies to ask how the gender and ethnicity of the writer may have inflected his or her writing. We will also use methods drawn from new historicism, which posits that any piece of writing is thoroughly embedded in its historical moment. In order to understand a text, we must reconstruct the history surrounding its production. In particular, our new historical approach will emphasize the way contemporaneous concepts of the self, the individual, or the "subject" influence the autobiographer's understanding of individual identity. As we are studying representations of selfhood, we will also approach the literature from the perspective of psychoanalytical theory. Does the "unconscious" play a role in the writer's conscious shaping of his or her life into the generic form of the autobiography? To use Freudian terms, what does the writer repress in telling the public story of a private life? As many of our writers will recount terrifying and horrific events, we will also draw on the developing branch of psychoanalytic criticism known as "trauma studies" to provide a framework for our discussion.
Grades will be determined primarily by your performance on two papers and one exam. Each paper will account for 30% of your final course grade, as will tfinal exam. Such factors as attendance, quiz performance, participation, and preparedness will contribute to the final 10% of the course grade. As this class is process as well as product oriented, your participation in all aspects of that process (reading and discussing as well as writing) is essential to the completion of the course requirements. Excessive absences, excused or unexcused, will damage your course grade, and I reserve the right to lower any person's semester grade if that person has more than three unexcused absences.
There will be a quiz over the reading assignments at least once a week. Quizzes will be either in the form of a 15-20 minute written response to a general question over the reading material.
The essays for this class should be completed in a professional and timely manner. Late papers will lose one-half a letter grade per class period (unless you provide me with evidence of a legitimate and verifiable excuse). A more detailed discussion of requirements for essays will be included on individual assignments. As this is an English course, your grade on the essays will be determined primarily by the quality of your writing. Each essay should have an original, specific, and significant thesis—an arguable assertion that you are making about the work being discussed. Each essay should provide textual evidence (quotations) in support of that thesis, and each essay should provide a well-developed analysis, discussion, and interpretation of that evidence. The papers that receive the highest grades will be well argued and well supported. The best papers also will be well written and relatively free of grammatical errors.
For papers, I assign letter grades that can be translated in terms of the following numerical values: C− (72), C (75), C+ (78). There are some exceptions to this pattern. An F corresponds to the numerical grade of 50. An assignment that is not completed will receive a grade of zero. Because the grade D− does not exist for me, a D grade will be assigned the value of 62. An A will be assigned the numerical value 100, an A− 95.
Please note that any student who needs accommodations in this course because of a disability should notify me at the beginning of the semester so that arrangements can be made.
As the publicity surrounding historian Stephen Ambrose's failure to use quotation marks to indicate direct quotations from the work of other historians indicates, borrowing someone else's words without appropriate acknowledgement is still frowned upon—despite the fact that the internet has made such intellectual theft easier than ever before. I expect students to act "in good faith" in doing original written work for the class. If a student violates that trust (even if it only involves a sentence or two lifted from an internet source without properly acknowledging the original), the punishment for plagiarism will be at minimum a failing grade on a particular assignment and at maximum failure of the course.