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Apr 20, 2024
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LAS 440 - Whose Life Is It, Anyway? The Ethical Mandate of Memoir 3 Credit Hours
This seminar focuses on how authors and their readers wrestle with issues of self-representation and fact in writing and reading memoir and other life narratives. Our inquiry begins with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a text that provides a dynamic frame to consider how the good life-or the lack of it-is being recorded by increasing numbers of authors today in the nonfiction genre of life writing. Excerpts from The Ethics of Life Writing, by Paul Eakin, and of writings from some of the earliest memoirists (Sei Shonagan, Rousseau, Montaigne, St. Augustine) will serve as a foundation for interpreting memoirs by Vivian Gornick, David Eggers, Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, Art Spiegelman, and other contemporary authors. By crafting a memoir essay of your own, you will have the opportunity to examine the fictional techniques that authors employ to shape true stories.
Prerequisite(s): Senior standing
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