Teaching Life Writing Texts

by Fuchs, Miriam; Howes, Craig

• ISBN13: 9780873528191
• ISBN10: 0873528190
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-28
• Publisher: Modern Language Assn of Amer

Summary

The past thirty years have witnessed a rapid growth in the number and variety of courses and programs that study life writing from literary, philosophical, psychological, and cultural perspectives. The field has evolved from the traditional approach that biographies and autobiographies were always about prominent people--historically significant persons, the nobility, celebrities, writers--to the conception of life writing as a genre of interrogation and revelation. The texts now studied include memoirs, testimonios, diaries, oral histories, genealogies, and group biographies and extend to resources in the visual and plastic arts, in films and videos, and on the Internet. Today the tensions between canonical and emergent life writing texts, between the famous and the formerly unrepresented, are making the study of biography and autobiography a far more nuanced and multifarious activity.This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching builds on and complements earlier work on pedagogical issues in life writing studies. Over forty contributors from a broad range of educational institutions describe courses for every level of postsecondary instruction. Some writers draw heavily on literary and cultural theory; others share their assignments and weekly syllabi. Many essays grapple with texts that represent disability, illness, abuse, and depression; ethnic, sexual and racial discrimination; crises and catastrophes; witnessing and testimonials; human rights violations; and genocide. The classes described are taught in humanities, cultural studies, social science, and language departments and are located in, among other countries, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, Eritrea, and South Africa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Generic Approaches
Literary Studies
Introduction to World Narrative	p. 23
Slipping Away, Sliding Around: Teaching Autobiography as-and Not as-History and Genre	p. 32
Life Writing and Biographical Fiction: Contemporary Teaching and Learning Strategies	p. 38
Diaries and Diarists	p. 45
Teaching Travel Writing as Life Writing	p. 53
Teaching "The Lives of the Victorians": A Historical Approach to Changing Conventions of Life Narrative	p. 59
Modernist American Literature and Life Writing	p. 68
The Subject of Drugs	p. 74
Sports Autobiographies and American Culture	p. 81
Writing the Self	p. 91
The Generic Instability of Contemporary Life Writing in Canada	p. 99
A + B [not equal] B + A: Teaching Autobiographies and Biographies in Pairs	p. 107
Biography, Oral History, Autobiography: A Graduate Course	p. 115
Interdisciplinary Approaches
A Text of Their Own: Life Writing as an Introduction to Undergraduate English Studies	p. 122
Teaching Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains	p. 129
Reading, Writing, Performing Life Writing: Multiple Constructions of Self	p. 135
"In My Life": Growing Up with the Beatles from Liverpool to Abbey Road	p. 143
The Whole Picture: Using Nonliterary Forms of Artistic Production to Teach Life Writing	p. 151
Life Writings as New Cultural Contexts for the Meanings of Art and Artist	p. 161
Emblematic Sculptures: The Artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the Life Writing Classroom	p. 171
A Graduate Seminar in Life Writing: Posing and Composing Lives	p. 180
Additional Resources for Teaching Life Writing Texts: Generic Approaches	p. 191
Cultural Approaches
Times and Places
The Many Voices of Creation: Early American and Canadian Life Writing	p. 195
Experiencing Collaborative Autobiography	p. 201
Teaching Contemporary Australian Autobiography	p. 208
Located Subjects	p. 214
Life Writing in the New South Africa	p. 221
An Undergraduate and Graduate Colloquium in Social History and Biography in the Modern Middle East and North Africa	p. 233
Teaching Multicultural Life-History Writing Texts through Technology's Third Space: Reflections on a University of Washington-University of Asmara Collaboration	p. 239
Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Approaches
No Indian Is an Island: On the Ethics of Teaching Indigenous Life Writing Texts	p. 252
Women, Race, Reading, and Feeling: Postmemory in Undergraduate Studies of Slave Narratives	p. 260
Olaudah Equiano and the Concept of Culture	p. 270
Eastern European Oral Narratives of the Walled-Up Wife and Their Retelling in Recent Life Writing Texts	p. 277
Discerning Diversity in American Lives	p. 286
Reading and Writing Ethnography	p. 292
Close Encounters: (Re)Teaching Ethnic Autobiography as Autoethnography	p. 303
Teaching Testimonio: A New, Ex-Centric Design Emerges	p. 310
Gendered and Sexual Orientation Approaches
Anxiety of Choice: Teaching Contemporary Women's Autobiography	p. 318
Teaching Jo Spence's Putting Myself in the Picture: Pedagogy and Life Writing in and outside the University	p. 327
Teaching Queer Lives	p. 336
Cultures of Life Writing	p. 343
Illness and Disability Approaches
Quality-of-Life Writing: Illness, Disability, and Representation	p. 350
Teaching Women's Depression Memoirs: Healing, Testimony, and Critique	p. 359
What Do We Teach When We Teach Trauma?	p. 367
Additional Resources for Teaching Life Writing: Cultural Approaches	p. 374
Life Writing Resources for Teachers	p. 376
Notes on Contributors	p. 383
Index	p. 391
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