Autobiography and the Self: Intellectual History 2, HST 202D

Fall '03

Crispin Sartwell

717 227 1902

c.sartwell@verizon.net

office: Bunting 432

Required text: Phillip Lopate (ed.): The Art of the Personal Essay

This semester you'll both read and compose the sort of autobiographical writing known as the personal essay. As we consider the classics of the genre starting with Montaigne, we will explore the limits and the possibilities of self-disclosure. One issue we will mess around with is whether the presentation of the self in writing - or for that matter in a variety of other public contexts - is necessarily a falsification or whether it can be an honest presentation of the self as it is. Or perhaps, most interestingly, writing is part of the process of choosing or manufacturing a self. The personal essay as a form pushes you to ask who you are and present that publicly, but it pushes you also to make or choose a self to present.

Required work for the course will consist of weekly one-page essays about the readings, and longer (7-10 pp.) autobiographical writings due at mid-term and at the end. Each piece will count a third toward your final grade, though I will also consider participation and improvement through the semester in assigning final grades. Any piece, including the weekly essays, may be re-written for a new grade.

Students with disabilities: please see me so that I can accommodate you.

Sept 2

Introduction

Sept 9

Lopate (pp. xxiii-liv)

Sept 16

Montaigne (pp. 43-112)

Sept 23

Cowley, Addison and Steele, Johnson, Edgeworth (pp.116-157)

Sept 30

Lamb and Hazlitt (pp.158-211)

Oct 7

Stevenson, Beerbohm, Chesterton (pp.212-254)

Oct 14

Woolf and Orwell (pp.255-302)

Oct 28

Turgenev, Lu, Tanizaki, Benjamin, Borges (pp. 305-386)

November 4

Butler, Cioran, Barthes, Ginzburg, Fuentes, Soyinka, Suleri (pp. 387-475)

Nov 11

Thoreau and Mencken (pp. 479-509)

November 18

Benchley Thurber, Fitzgerald, White, Fisher (pp. 510-533)

Nov 25

McCarthy, Krim, Baldwin (pp. 554-621)

December 2

Vidal, Rich, Hoagland, Berry, Didion (pp. 622-691)

December 9

Dillard, Selzer, Lopate, Sanders, Pemberton, Rodriguez (pp. 692-770)

Draft of final project?

Dec 16

Conclusion

Final project due.