The Art of Memoir and the Personal Essay
This genre is often marked by the urgency the author has to tell the story, a need that translates into fresh methods, new forms, and a struggle to decide what it means to say something is true. In this class we will discuss many approaches to (attempts at?) writing about one’s own life, time, generation, or place. These will include everything from first-person war essays to coming-of-age narratives, from comics to meditations. We’ll read collage and cross-genre texts, along with narrative self-portraits and aphorisms. We’ll talk about how these books are shaped, from where they draw tension, how they assemble and disassemble a self, how they use historical or political setting, what they leave in and cut out, and ultimately why these books move us.
Possible readings will include some combination of books or excerpts by these authors (subject to change):
Patti Smith, Renee Gladman, Sarah Manguso, Frank McCourt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Steve Martin, Leanne Shapton, Sei Shonagon, Malcolm X, Sarah Ruhl, Franz Kafka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eula Biss, Michael Herr, Claudia Rankine, Carrie Brownstein, Ishmael Reed, Julie Doucet, Frederick Douglass, David Foster Wallace, Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman.
In addition we will read memoir pieces written by my current students in a maximum-security prison in southern Texas.
Students will do a final project of their own writing in the genre.