230373 Life Writing and American Literature and Culture (S) (WiSe 2021/2022)

Much has been written about narrating one’s own life and the lives of others that scholars have subsumed amongst others under life writing which includes a multiplicity of different (sub-)genres such as autobiography, biography or diary (see, e.g., Smith and Watson 2010). In the last decades, research has continuously added new perspectives, objects of study, and probed, expanded and challenged what life writing means.

Our course explores the role of life writing for reflections on, and inventions of, the social in the United States from a variety of perspectives, e.g., how life stories of or about people contributed to new social developments and vice versa, the interrelations between life narratives, the social and different forms of media, and forms of creativity that encompass but also go beyond the conventional notions associated with cultural production.

Bibliography

Chaplin, Joyce E., ed. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography [1771-88]. New York: Norton, 2012.
Andrews, William and William McFeely, eds. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1845]. New York: Norton, 2017.
Goldsby, Jacqueline, ed. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [1912/1927]. New York: Norton, 2015.