First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-21)
Topic
American Selfies
Instructors
Jay A Grossman
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 3-410: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
American Selfies: Four Centuries of American Life Writing
From selfies to Instagram to Twitter bios and other social media, we are all writing our autobiographies all the time. Our phones chronicle our daily experiences and we share them so that friends and strangers around the world consume the details of our lives in real time.
In this class, we'll revisit some classic works of American autobiography in order to take stock of the long backstory to our current autobiographical moment. How have prior generations thought about the possibilities of telling their life stories? What have been the stakes in doing so? Who were the imagined readers of these texts, and what happens when they're read in contexts and by people that the original authors could hardly have imagined—including all of us now in the twenty-first century.
In every case we'll be interested in the ways—different from ours—that these authors constructed the stories of their lives, as well as the cultural, political, social, and national contexts within which they lived their lives and told their stories.
Class Materials (Required)
Our reading will include autobiographical works from every century but the last:
• Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan woman captured by Native Americans who wrote about her experiences in 1682;
• Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who wrote his action-packed, name-dropping life story in the 1780s;
• William Apess, a Pequot, who wrote the first autobiography by a Native American in 1829;
• Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved person turned brilliant abolitionist leader whose 1845 Narrative is an American classic;
• Colson Whitehead, whose 2019 novel Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and turned the conventions of autobiography on their head;
• and the great gay poet Walt Whitman, who invented in the 1850s a wholly new kind of poetry to tell his story.
Class Attributes
WCAS Writing Seminar