GERST 6210 - [Writing the Self]

(crosslisted) COML 6032

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

E. Siegel.

The “autobiographical” spans millennia and encompasses a vast array of seemingly dissimilar authors and modes of writing: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions, Montaigne’s Essays, Pepys’ diaries, Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, Freud’s letters to Fliess accompanying his self-analysis, the corpus of diaries from Amiel to Kafka and Woolf to Warhol or Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. In this course, we will investigate the emergence of writing a self out of practices such as ascetic (in the Foucauldian sense) self-exploration and confession and the risks of introspection under conditions of secularization. We will explore theories of the autobiographical but also ask what kind of artistic practices and theoretical fields have emerged from genres like autobiography or diary (projects like cartographies in Perec or Ernaux; notions like aesthetics or ethics of everyday life). What stabilizing or destabilizing functions does writing the self serve? Is the ‚I’ merely framed by narrative conventions, space and time (Blanchot), or can it find ways to mediate self and world, individual and society in writing?