This course relies on the more inclusive label of life writing to address contemporary texts that experiment with hybrid generic forms and literary strategies that go beyond classical definitions of autobiography or biography. We will discuss these texts in tandem with new approaches in life-writing studies and explore concepts and issues such as memoir, autopathography, autofiction, intermediality, the entanglements of autobiography and biography, relationality, performativity and self-representation and the like. The analyses of our materials will focus on the relationship between narrative strategies and questions of identity, memory, embodiment and agency. We will further look at the authors’ exploration of gender, race and sexuality through personal storytelling.
Please note that the books listed below only constitute the core texts of our course that will be complemented by further texts and materials once it has become clearer how teaching in the winter semester will proceed.
Texts:
Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End of (2006)
Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road (2010)
Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost (2003)
Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)
Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (2017) (Lektürekurs) |
