ENGL 90071 - Life-Writing:Biog & Autobiog

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

Writing about a life, giving a shape to something called a life his is a perpetual concern of writers in different parts of the world, and of many different kinds of writers, historians, novelists, psychologists included. Life-writing seems intimately related to theology, as we may see in the New Testament, as in the stories of Moses or Buddha, and in the meditations of Augustine in the fourth century or the Sufi mystic al-Ghazali in the twelfth century. Travel writing (including stories of discovery seem largely life-writing in masquerade, while history engages in extensive accounts of individual life and experience. Poets and novelists have long played with writing lives, and presenting individuals engaged in life-writing, wherein (as in theological discourse) the life is a paradigm and an emblem. The life may involve seeking, wandering through a labyrinth or wilderness, searching for some desired object or relief in alienation and loneliness. The exile or wanderer may turn to autobiography, yet such life-writing is perilous for the writer, the narrator inviting decoding him-/ herself while offering us various tropes and devices endeavoring to conceal as well as to reveal. Our study includes narratives of antiquity and of modern times, of the East and the West. Starting with the most ancient of surviving presentations of lives, we pursue highly conscious and aesthetically, politically and psychologically shaded biographies, as in the work of Suetonius and Plutarch writing of emperors, politicians and literary men. We will see how effectively such lives and representations became part of Renaissance culture, following for example the personage of the conspirator Catiline from Cicero's speeches through Ben Jonson's play. Poets like Horace develop the autobiographical impulse, seen and felt very differently in St Perpetua and St. Augustine. Spiritual and temporal observation of self and selves are effected in Arabic poems, and in the meditative writings of al-Ghazali In the Early Modern period in the West, personal reflection becomes vital and disconcerting, as we see in (selected) Essais of the questioning aristocratic Montaigne and the dramatic Grace Abounding by John Bunyan, tinker of Bedford. Boswell in his Journal and in his Life of Johnson exhibits the tensions of being a 'self' and writing a 'life' of another. The Novel has long been a home for redefining and exploring the 'self' as we see in the Greek Calirrhoe by Chariton and in the novels of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the context of Descartes and Locke we see that the self is taxed with maximum loneliness--as is worked out in novels like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The contradictions and imitative qualities of the 'self' are almost frighteningly displayed by Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau. The 20th century is represented by Arabic and Eastern narratives, some drawn from 'real life,' some fictional, including Huda Shaarawi's Harem Years, and Daughter of the River by Hong Ying. We shall also discuss the new concepts and terminologies introduced by Western psychology as if universals, taking as a major case in point Sigmund Freud's Dora (Bruchstück einer Hyesterie- Analyse)

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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