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Course Info

  • Course Number / Code:
  • 21W.730-3 (Spring 2001) 
  • Course Title:
  • Expository Writing: Autobiography - Theory and Practice 
  • Course Level:
  • Undergraduate 
  • Offered by :
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
    Massachusetts, United States  
  • Department:
  • Writing and Humanistic Studies 
  • Course Instructor(s):
  • Prof. Elizabeth Fox 
  • Course Introduction:
  •  


  • 21W.730-3 Expository Writing: Autobiography - Theory and Practice



    Spring 2001




    Course Highlights


    This course features downloadable assignmentsbibliography, and samples of student work.


    Course Description


    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.
     

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:
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