123231 AR Literature Course (interactive) (2016S)

People are eternally fascinated by other people's life stories, and the urge to record these stories is often considered a basic human need. This course will explore the representation of historical and contemporary lives in biography, autobiography, biographical fiction, biopics, bioplays, biographical poetry and blogs, on the basis of extracts from a range of texts (including Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road and The Adoption Papers, Amma Asante’s biopic Belle, David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl, but partly of the participants’ own choosing). Themes that will occupy us throughout include the aesthetics and politics of subject representation and the notion of biographical truth in different media, the questions whose lives get told, for what reasons, and in what form. We will also address the benefits of using life-writing texts in the EFL classroom.

AIMS: Students will become familiar with a range of genres of life-writing. They will be able to explain key concerns articulated in these works and contextualize them appropriately with reference to their generic context and to historical sources. They will further be able to apply various critical approaches to life writing – such as biographical theory, cultural memory studies, gender and postcolonial theory –in presentations, discussions and in a short scholarly paper.