The tutor will supply additional reading lists, links to articles and visual material to support work on the specific authors being studied.
These are more general critical and theoretical books which will be useful for the longer essay assignment.
Autobiography by
If every writer necessarily draws on their own life, is any writing outside the realm of 'autobiography'? The new edition of this classic guide is fully updated to include: developments in autobiographical criticism, highlighting major theoretical issues and concepts different forms of the genre from confessions and narratives to memoirs and diaries uses of the genre in their historical and cultural contexts major autobiographical writers including St Augustine, Bunyan, Boswell, Rousseau and Wordsworth, alongside non-canonical autobiographies by women twentieth-century autobiography including women's writing, black and postcolonial writing, and personal criticism a new chapter on narrative and new material examining recent trends in autobiography such as blogs, the popularity of literary memoirs and recent developments in theory on testimonial writing. Combining theoretical discussion with thought-provoking readings of major texts, this is the ideal introduction to the study of a fascinating genre.
Interpreting Women's Lives by
Interpreting Women's Lives offers rich insights into the ways that women's voices and life stories can inform scholarly research and expand our understanding of both the shared experience of gender and the profound differences among women.
Fictions in Autobiography by
Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing.
How Our Lives Become Stories by
The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Kathryn Harrison's controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours "the age of memoir." And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are.
Using life writings as examples--including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth--Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one's body shapes one's identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.
Missing Persons by
Auto/biography is currently one of the most popular literary genres, widely supposed to illuminate the study of the individual and his or her personal circumstances. Missing Persons suggests that auto/biography is, in fact, based on fictions, both about the person and about what it is possible to know about any one individual.
Organised into chapters which consider particular kinds of auto/biographical writing, such as work on the British Royal Family and auto/biographies of twentieth-century men, this book demonstrates the absences and evasions - indeed the `missing persons - of auto/biography. Mary Evans' book will provide invaluable reading for students of womens studies, sociology and cultural studies courses.
Memory in the Twenty-First Century by
This book maps and analyses the changing state of memory at the start of the twenty-first century in essays written by scientists, scholars and writers. It recontextualises memory by investigating the impact of new conditions such as the digital revolution, climate change and an ageing population on our world.
The tutor will supply additional reading lists, links to articles and visual material to support work on the specific authors being studied.
These are more general critical and theoretical books which will be useful for the longer essay assignment.
Relating Narratives by
Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and literature can open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is.
Handling the Truth by
Writing memoir is a deeply personal, and consequential, undertaking. As the acclaimed author of five memoirs spanning significant turning points in her life, Beth Kephart has been both blessed and bruised by the genre. In Handling the Truth, she thinks out loud about the form - on how it gets made, on what it means to make it, on the searing language of truth, on the thin line between remembering and imagining, and, finally, on the rights of memoirists. Drawing on proven writing lessons and classic examples, on the work of her students and on her own memories of weather, landscape, color, and love, Kephart probes the wrenching and essential questions that lie at the heart of memoir. A beautifully written work in its own right, Handling the Truthis Kephart's memoir-writing guide for those who read or seek to write the truth. 'A marvelous primer for anyone who would dare to face the furies and write about his or her life. Beth Kephart has read the genre closely, put her own feet to the fire, and distilled the form with all the passion of a great teacher.' Marie Arana, author of The National Book Award Finalist American Chica'With infectious passion and hard-won wisdom, Beth Kephart eloquently celebrates the rigors and rewards of the creative process and equally necessary the art of crafting a meaningful life. Read it and learn how to tell your story. Better yet, read it and begin to understand why your story matters.' Katina Kenison, author of Magical Journey- An Apprenticeship in Contentment'Beth Kephart has done something extraordinary with this huge and messy thing called memoir roping it into submission with her typically beautiful writing. In this well-organized book, every example is a precious stone to turn over and to learn from, particularly in terms of crafting a voice and finding one's way in. Memoir is an academic field. This should become the seminal text.' Buzz Bissinger, author of Father's Day, A Prayer For The City, And Friday Night Lights
Body Parts by
A collection of essays communicating the problems of reading and writing biography. The book explores the relationship between biography and fiction. Looking at writers' lives in connection with their work, Lee raises profound and intriguing issues about aspects of writing and reading a life
On Autobiography by
Encompassing classical masterworks, popular literature, how-to manuals, the painted self-portrait, and oral as well as written narratives, Lejeune makes a bold case for autobiography as a priveleged source for the understanding of social and cultural history.
In the Presence of Audience by
As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer's tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself. In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf Kathenne Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing's fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather; their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author's male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain male censorship which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self. Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primary private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.
Memory and Narrative by
Memory and Narrative presents an elegant, authoritative account of how life-writing has changed over time to arrive at its present form. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.
Picturing Ourselves by
Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.
The Language of Autobiography by
The urge to autobiography reveals itself every day, in the stories we tell about ourselves. Literary autobiography is the most highly developed form of this universal activity of self-promotion, a kind of writing practised in the west over many centuries. In this major study of the western tradition, John Sturrock analyses the means by which more than twenty of the greatest literary autobiographers have gone about their task. The book concentrates on the productive tension between the writer's will to singularity and the autobiographical act itself, which restores by conventional and rhetorical means the harmony between the writer and a community of readers. By attending closely and sceptically to the truth-claims made by autobiographers from Augustine through Rousseau and Darwin to Sartre and Michel Leiris, Sturrock establishes some of the deep, hidden continuities of autobiographical writing, and shows how artful and self-conscious this supposedly most sincere of literary genres can be.
Memory; An Anthology by
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits & pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all. This anthology introduces us to arguments & experiences, evocative moments & hard scientific debate on the subject of memory, the thread that holds our lives & our history together. Stimulating and provocative and often profoundly moving, Memory is a book to treasure - and remember. Harriet Harvey Wood is the former Head of Literature at the British Council and A.S. Byatt is pre-eminent as a novelist and critic.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
Father and Son by
At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by 
If This Is a Man by
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH
Swann's Way by
'The Way by Swann's' is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine.
Childhood by
As one of the leading proponents of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute is often remembered for her novels, including The Golden Fruits, which earned her the Prix international de litterature in 1964. But her carefully crafted and evocative memoir Childhood may in fact be Sarraute's most accessible and emotionally open work. Written when the author was eighty-three years old, but dealing with only the first twelve years of her life, Childhood is constructed as a dialogue between Sarraute and her memory. Sarraute gently interrogates her interlocutor in search of her own intentions, more precise accuracy, and indeed, the truth. Her relationships with her mother in Russia and her stepmother in Paris are especially heartbreaking: long-gone actions are prodded and poked at by Sarraute until they yield some semblance of fact, imbuing these maternalistic interactions with new, deeper meaning. Each vignette is bristling with detail and shows the power of memory through prose by turns funny, sad, and poetic. Capturing the ambience of Paris and Russia in the earliest part of the twentieth century, while never giving up the lyrical style of Sarraute's novels, this book has much to offer both memoir enthusiasts and fiction lovers.
Fragments: Memories of a Childhood by 
