Course module - American Self-Representation
Code : AMER30081 Credit rating: 20 Semester : 1
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Aims |
Objectives |
Assessment |
Information
|
Course Content |
Course Materials |
Tutors |
Timetable |
Teaching Methods |
Keywords
Aims
- To develop and advance students’ command and technique of textual analysis.
- To introduce students to a range of key texts and debates in the study of American autobiography and other forms of self-representation.
- To develop students’ understanding of the broader questions, assumptions and contexts of narrative and narrative strategy.
- To foster skills in written expression and independent research at a level appropriate to work that will form part of a student’s final degree assessment.
Objectives (Learning Outcomes)
By the end of the module students should be able to:
- Acquire and demonstrate capacity for critical textual analysis.
- Recognize the narrative strategies of autobiographical representation.
- Evaluate, critically and analytically, texts of self-representation.
- Demonstrate skills in written expression and independent research at a level appropriate to work that will form part of a student’s final degree assessment.
Assessment
One 2,500-word essay (50%); presentation (10%); journal (40%)
Information
THIS COURSE IS NOT AVAILABLE AS FREE CHOICE.
Course Content
This is a course on American autobiography and other forms of self-representation. Self-writing is among the earliest American writing – including early essays and letters, slave narratives, and oral histories –and has served as a keystone for much subsequent American writing and expression through to the present day. This course will follow a trajectory of American self-representation from the slave narrative through to self-writing as produced by and involved in struggles for civil rights to very recent examples of self-representation including the AIDS memoir and expressions of sexual identity.
The project of studying texts of self-representation is an interdisciplinary one, in that it requires not only the investigative thinking of literary analysis, but lateral thinking into what different kinds of literature make possible and make intelligible: about writing and its categorical presumptions; about the relationship between space and locality to cultural production; about what is American and what “makes” an American; and about understandings of the self and subjectivity.
Course Materials
Tutor(s)
Pearl, Dr Monica
Timetable
PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE FOR 2012-2013
Seminars: Monday 2.00-4.00 plus tutorial 4.00-5.00; Wednesday, 10.00-12.00 plus tutoral 12.00-1.00
Teaching Methods
One 2-hour seminar plus one 1-hour tutorial per week.
Preliminary reading
Emerson and Thoreau, slave narratives, Mary Antin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Kate Millett, Edmund White, Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast (1996); Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw (1994); Leslie Feinstein. Class texts will also include films (Watermelon Woman, Tongues Untied, Silverlake Life) and Photographs (Nan Goldin).