FYSP 087 - Life Stories: Memory, Identity, Memoir

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
Why do people write their own stories? And why are we so interested in reading them? In this class we will read and discuss a variety of texts that claim to represent real people - from the Confessions of St. Augustine to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. We will consider what such texts can tell us about the complex intersections of ‘art’ and ‘truth,’ as we explore questions of empathy and voyeurism, self-expression, ethics, memory, and the making of identity.