In Writing Autobiography, we conduct interlinked experiments in writing and, importantly, reading autobiography. Students read and interrogate a range of texts (some explicitly autobiographical and others testing the genre's boundaries). They are encouraged to engage critically with taken-for-granted ideas about autobiography, including: the idea of the author's clear-cut relationship to the autobiographical narrative; ideas about authenticity and the rhetoric of authenticity; ideas about the relationship between bodies, places and identity; the sensorium and poetic modes; humanness and memory; pasts and presents. Students will attempt writing beyond the constraints of common assumptions about both writing and being, and they will consider new possibilities for writing about the self, or even against the idea of the self.

Subject rules

Readings