Mar 29, 2024  
2022-2023 Westminster College Catalog 
    
2022-2023 Westminster College Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 407 - Autobiography/Biography

Semester Hours: 4

What is the driving force behind our culture’s current obsession with memoirs? And how do modern technologies such as blogging, texting, and “facebook-ing” represent new, complicated forms of self-narration? In this service-learning course, we will seek answers to these and other questions through both traditional and experiential learning: in the classroom, we will explore how autobiographical and (to a lesser extent) biographical texts blur boundaries among categories of fiction and fact, private and public, personal and political. Texts will represent a wide range of life writing subgenres, including travel and captivity narratives, confessional autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, poems, and novels. Authors may include (but are not limited to) William Wordsworth, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, Jack London, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, Sandra Cisneros, Helen Fielding, and Diana Abu-Jaber. While reading these texts, students will explore technological dimensions of autobiography by forging e-mail partnerships with high school students, exchanging letters periodically throughout the semester as a means of participating in an ongoing literacy project. Through this combination of course readings and e-mail partnerships, we will explore how the authenticity of autobiography affects writer/reader relationships & enhances reading and writing practices.