LLSL2840

This course traces the literary form of the autobiography through a series of popular autobiographies, first-person novels, memoirs, and autobiographical fiction. How has a literary genre shaped by the practice of priests led us to “reality” TV? We begin with Saint Augustine’s fourth-century Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions. To grasp the flowering of the pseudo-autobiographical novel, we read such mid-Victorian masterpieces as Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Dickens's David Copperfield. We also consider the popularity of the slave memoir, reading Frederick Douglass's bestselling Narrative. Finally, we return to the genre-bending confessions of a novelist in our own time, reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and “Biography of a Dress.”