LS 691 - Writing a Life: Architecture of the Memoir

(3.00 cr.)

The popularity of life-writing genres has grown extensively in the past half century. Creative nonfiction, including the memoir, has supplanted some of the literary territory previously reserved for novels and other thinly-veiled fiction. Of all nonfiction, the memoir offers perhaps the most daunting research and exploration. The process of mining one's own life for material offers an emotional challenge but also a substantial reward: a chance at fresh self-invention and self-interpretation. The memoir also offers a vision of how one's life appears in the context of a creative work. Because of the proliferation of memoir genre, much theory has been developed to assess it. Students explore these concepts while examining diverse examples of strong memoirs from the past century, along with the writing of peers. The principal written work of the course is the production of three formal sections of a personal memoir.