Writing Back: Life Writing and Speaking Truth to Power
This section of English 111 will study how writers use personal experience – their own or others’ – in life narratives (or “non-fiction prose”) to make meaning of those experiences and make interventions in public knowledge. The life narratives we’ll study this semester show how individual stories can work to resist dominant norms and stereotypes – for example, of refugee experiences or global conflicts – and offer personal perspectives on historical events that may challenge or disrupt official versions. We’ll examine the rhetorical and literary strategies authors use to bear witness, create family stories, and construct or reconstruct their own identities. We will three book-length memoirs — Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah; Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir; and Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, by David Chariandy – and several essay-length texts (TBD). Our discussions of these narratives will be informed by relevant scholarly conversations, and students will contribute to those conversations in a research paper as well as in two short analytical essays and a final exam. Classes will take place in person.