21W.730-3 Expository Writing: Autobiography - Theory and Practice, Spring 2001
Author(s)
Fox, Elizabeth
Alternative Title
Expository Writing: Autobiography - Theory and Practice
Date Issued
June 2001
Abstract
Focus: What can we believe when we read an autobiography? How do writers recall, select, shape, and present their lives to construct life stories? Readings that ground these questions include selections from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent (pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs), "A Sketch of the Past" by Virginia Woolf, Notes of A Native Son by James Baldwin, "The Achievement of Desire" by Richard Rodriguez, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin. Discussion, papers, and brief oral presentations will focus on the content of the life stories as well as the forms and techniques authors use to shape autobiography. We will identify masks and stances used to achieve various goals, sources and interrelationships of technical and thematic concerns, and "fictions" of autobiographical writing. Assignments will allow students to consider texts in terms of their implicit theories of autobiography, of theories we read, and of students' experiences; assignments also allow some autobiographical writing.
Subjects
writing
autobiography
text
composition
critical reading
voice
Exposition
narration
critique
argument
persuasion
oral presentations
prose
write
revising
life stories
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
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