Spring 2025
Prereq: One subject in Literature, permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
This is a class on autobiography and in it we will play the hits: Douglass, Ellison, Didion, Jordan, Thoreau, Clifton. Stanley Cavell’s The Pitch of Philosophy, with its elegant dance between life-writing and the major disciplinary debates of the day; the James Baldwin classic, No Name in The Street, and its instructive opening image: Baldwin’s mother saying, “That’s a good idea” in reference to a yard of black velvet, and for months the boy thinks that ideas are pieces of fabric; Harriet Jacobs’s 19th-century narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which she writes letters from a crawlspace to deceive those intent on her capture, using the written word to transport herself many miles beyond her current surroundings.
Each week, these texts will help us compose ourselves anew on the page. Always, though, there will be a set of questions about craft following us as we study: Where to start? How to begin the story of our beginnings? [Pre-1900]