Third Year Module
Module Leader: Gill Lowe
Description
This module will start with an historical overview of autobiography from earliest times to the present. Autobiographical forms to be considered include diaries, memoirs, confessional literature, Bildungsroman, therapeutic, survival and captive narratives, Künstlerroman, celebrity and ‘ghosted’ lives.
The module considers authorial perspective and reliability, as well as the ways in which the first person narrator is both ‘author’ and ‘character’. Students will study the ambiguous relationship between autobiography and fiction, looking at authority, memory and self-censorship. The ethics of writing about others as part of the autobiographical process will also be considered. Students will consider versions of auto/biography that blur and challenge genre boundaries and scrutinise life-stories as statements of racial, sexual and social identity.