| Unit name | Writing the Self: Literature and Autobiography |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL29003 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Bennett |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit will explore texts which take as their topic the life of the writer, focusing on the relationship between writing and life as it is figured in fictions of autobiography. The unit is concerned with ways in which authors represent their own lives in literary texts – whether autobiographical in a conventional sense, fictionalised autobiography, or more loosely based around authors' lives. We will examine a number of key texts published over the last two centuries, including poems and poem-collections, novels, short stories, memoirs, and essays. A consideration of such texts will necessarily lead into questions concerning the nature of biography and autobiography; the historical development of the autobiographical mode; fiction and history; memory, forgetting and the unconscious; the nature of confession and personal identity; the politics of self-representation; questions of gender and sexuality; the limits of genre; truth telling and lies; 'literary' and other writing; and so on.
Aims:
The unit is intended to provide an introduction to literary autobiography, to fictionalised autobiography and to questions surrounding such modes of writing; it is intended to encourage students to develop their skills of critical analysis and thinking by engaging with a series of literary texts particularly concerned with autobiography and the critical and theoretical issues raised thereby.
An understanding of the place of autobiography and representations of the authorial self in the literary history of the last two centuries; an in-depth reading of a number of literary texts of the period; an understanding of the critical and theoretical issues surrounding the autobiographical mode.
1 x 2 hour seminar per week in one teaching block, plus 1-to-1 discussion in consultation hours where desired.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
D.H.Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Prelude’ (1918) and ‘At the Bay’ (1922)
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939-40)
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; 1966)
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1965)
Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (1998)
