Life Writing Course

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2009-05-22T08:40:00.010+12:00

[Self-portraits]

Life Writing

Administration:

Welcome

Course Timetable

Course Requirements

Course Description

Bibliography

Assignments

[Self-portraits (St. George's School)]

Lectures / Workshops:

Lecture 1 - What is Life Writing? [MP]
- Workshop 1:
  - Exercise 1: 'This is the indelible place you lived in'

Lecture 2 - Memory [JR]
- Workshop 2:
  - Exercise 2: Changes

Lecture 3 - Memoirs, Diaries [MP]
- Workshop 3:
  - Exercise 3: Questionnaire

Lecture 4 - Biography (via Autobiography) [MP]
- Workshop 4:
  - Exercise 4: Journal Writing

Lecture 5 - Oral History / Collecting Data [MP]
- Workshop 5:
  - Exercise 5: Rules and Taboos

Lecture 6 - Case Studies [Panel Discussion]
- Workshop 6:
  - Exercise 6: Family Gatherings

Lecture 7 - Confession or Performance? [JR]
- Workshop 7:
  - Exercise 7: Seven

Lecture 8 - Genre [JR]
- Workshop 8:
  - Exercise 8: Life Studies

Lecture 9 - Subversion [JR]
- Workshop 9:
  - Exercise 9: Life Distortions

Lecture 10 - Politics of Lives [MP]
- Workshop 10:
  - Discussing Proposals

Lecture 11 - Writing a Biography [Janet Hunt]
[No workshop this week]

Lecture 12 - New Zealand Life Stories [MP]
- Workshop 11:
  - Sharing Writing

[Frida Kahlo]

Lecture / Workshop 12

2009-05-21T08:45:00.013+12:00

[Gillian Chaplin: Kathleen Pih-Chang (1988)]

Lecture 12:
New Zealand Life Stories

Anthology texts to read:

Miriam Cameron: from 60s Chicks Hit the Nineties, ed. Jane Tolerton (1997)
Michael King: 'The Long Shadow,' from Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)
Kathleen Pih-Chang: from Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand, ed. Manying Ip (1990)

[Michael King]

This is more of an invitation to discussion than a lecture as such.

What do you know now about the ethics (and practicalities) of turning your own or other people's lives into writing that you didn't know three months ago, when the course started?

We've talked about the advantages (and pitfalls) of confessionalism, we've talked about the opportunities (and constraints) offered by different genres, we've talked about sexual politics and avant-garde poetics ... Which ones, among this smorgasbord of topics, are of most interest to you? Which do you think will help you most in your future writing (and thinking)?

Finally, I'll also be asking you to fill in the course assessment forms at the back of your Administration Guide, so this is your chance to make your views known. Any feedback gratefully (but also anonymously) received ...

NB: Any students enrolled in 139.226 who have journals, exercises or final assignments written for the course which you'd like to have published online on the course anthology are very welcome to submit them here.

[Chris Skelton: Miriam Cameron (2006)]

Workshop 11:
Sharing Writing

[Miriam Cameron: Red Stream at Stoney Crossing, Chatham Islands (1998)]

Lecture 11

2009-05-20T08:07:00.007+12:00

[Hone Tuwhare]

Lecture 11:
Writing a Biography

Janet Hunt

Anthology texts to read:

Janet Hunt: 'Green-leaved Anguish,' from Hone Tuwhare: A Biography (1998)

[Case Studies]

Lecture / Workshop 10

2009-05-19T08:27:00.008+12:00

[Anne Sexton]

Lecture 10:
Politics of Lives

[Dr. Mary Paul]

Anthology texts to read:

Norman Bilbrough: 'The Facts of Life: Him,' from Grace (January 2001: 62-64)
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku: ‘Old Man Tuna,' from Tahuri (1989)
Anne Sexton: ‘The Double Image,’ ‘For My Lover Returning To His Wife' & ‘The Fury of Overshoes,’ from The Complete Poems (1981)
Jane Westaway: 'The Facts of Life: Her,' from Grace (January 2001: 59-61)

Let's begin with the concept of the zeitgeist, or Spirit of the Age.

In our age, this could be said to be Sexual Politics, the sexual revolution, the Battle of the Sexes, or the so-called "second wave" of international Feminism.

The first wave was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the second was in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the present.
- Charlotte Krolokke & Anne Scott Sorensen (2005). "Three Waves of Feminism: From Suffragettes to Grrls". Gender Communication Theories and Analyses:From Silence to Performance (Thousand Oaks, CA & London: Sage Publications, 2006): 24.

If you had to reduce this movement to a single tenet, it would definitely be:

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

One of the first things we discover in these [consciousness-raising] groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time."
- Carol Hanisch (1969). "The Personal is Political". Feminist Revolution: Notes from the Second Year. Ed. Shulie Firestone & Anne Koedt (USA: Redstockings, 1969): 204-5.

But what does (or did) that mean in practice? Let's move on from our discussion of the Confessional poetry of the 1960s and 70s to the Feminist writing of the 70s and 80s ...

[Anthony Browell: Germaine Greer (1972)]

Workshop 10:
Discussing Proposals

[The Facts of Life]

Lecture / Workshop 9

2009-05-18T07:25:00.005+12:00

[J. G. Ballard]

Lecture 9:
Subversion

Anthology texts to read:

J. G. Ballard: 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,' from The Day of Forever (1967)
Georges Perec: from W or the Memory of Childhood (1975)

"... nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben."

[... to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.]

- Theodor Adorno, Prisms (1955)

"Language is a virus from outer space"
- William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)

[W. S. Burroughs]

J. G. Ballard on William Burroughs:

His three novels are the first definite portrait of the inner landscape of our mid-century, using its own language and manipulative techniques, its own fantasies and nightmares … The almost complete inability of English critics to understand Burroughs is as much a social failure as a literary one, a refusal to recognise the materials of the present decade as acceptable for literary purposes until a lapse of a generation or so has given to a few brand names an appropriately discreet nostalgia. One result is the detachment of the English social novel from everyday life to a point where it is fast becoming a minor genre as unrelated to common experience as the country house detective story (by contrast the great merit of science fiction has been its ability to assimilate rapidly the material of the immediate present and future, although it is now failing in precisely those areas where the future has already become the past). Whatever his reservations about some aspects of the mid-twentieth century, Burroughs accepts that it can be fully described only in terms of its own language , its own idioms and verbal lore.

- Quoted in New Worlds: An Anthology. Ed. Michael Moorcock (London: Flamingo, 1983): 12.

[Hieronymus Bosch:
The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell (1500)]

This is the last of my three lectures about the consequences (and fallout) of "confessionalism" as a literary movement. Today I'd like to talk about two literary traditions: one European and the other Anglo-American. Your first reaction might be to see them as at the other end of the spectrum to the texts we've been looking at until now, but I'd prefer to define them as a kind of inverted mirror to more straightforwardly "self-revelatory" writing.

How revealing is confessional poetry, really? How much of it is just an act. By the same token, how can you avoid details of your life experience coming across in even the most apparently mechanical and pre-programmed writing?

In any case, on one hand we have the fairly well-organised group of mainly French-speaking writers known collectively as OuLiPo [Ouvroir de littérature potentielle = Workshop of Potential Literature], led and inspired by Raymond Queneau (1903-1976). Important members of the group include Italo Calvino (1923-1985) and Georges Perec (1936-1982).

On the other hand we have the far less structured set of experimental writers led and inspired by the Beat writer William Burroughs, who pioneered the technique known as the cut-ups. One might include, along with him, the punk post-feminist writer Kathy Acker (1945-1997), and the British Science-Fiction novelist J. G. Ballard (1930-2009).

Major works in the Anglo-American tradition:

W. S. Burroughs: Junkie (1953)
W. S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
W. S. Burroughs: The Soft Machine (1961)
J. G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
W. S. Burroughs: The Ticket that Exploded (1962)
W. S. Burroughs: Nova Express (1963)
Kathy Acker: Politics (1972)
J. G. Ballard: Crash (1973)
Kathy Acker: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973)
W. S. Burroughs: Cities of the Red Night (1981)
Kathy Acker: Great Expectations (1983)
Kathy Acker: Blood and Guts in High School (1984)
J. G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun (1984)
W. S. Burroughs: Queer (1985)

Major works in the European tradition:

Raymond Queneau: Exercices de Style [Exercises in Style] (1947)
Raymond Queneau: Zazie dans le métro [Zazie in the Metro] (1959)
Raymond Queneau: Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes [A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems] (1961)
Italo Calvino: Il castello dei destini incrociati [The Castle of Crossed Destinies] (1969)
Georges Perec: La Disparition [A Void] (1969)
Italo Calvino: Le città invisibili [Invisible Cities] (1972)
Georges Perec: Les Revenentes [The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex] (1972)
Georges Perec: W ou le souvenir d'enfance [W, or the Memory of Childhood] (1975)
Georges Perec: Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien [Attempt to Exhaust a Parisian Space] (1975)
Georges Perec: La Vie mode d'emploi [Life: A User's Manual] (1978)
Italo Calvino: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore [If on a Winter's Night a Traveller] (1979)

Profoundly troubled times breed profoundly troubled (and troubling) works of art, one might say. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, many writers thought, conventional approaches to experience no longer seemed adequate to the changed texture of reality.

Do we, in fact, see things "as they are" - or as they're projected to us. You didn't have to be paranoid to think that everyone was out to get you if you lived in the twentieth century ...

[Perec & friend]

Workshop 9:
Life Distortions

[Life Class]

Lecture / Workshop 8

2009-05-17T08:21:00.009+12:00

[Elizabeth Bishop cartoon]

Lecture 8:
Genre

Anthology texts to read:

Elizabeth Bishop: 'In the Village,' from Questions of Travel (1965)
Robert Lowell: 'The Scream,' from For the Union Dead (1964)

[Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)]

"Once you master epic diction, epic diction will write your epic for you"
- Johann Wolgang von Goethe

Genre is the name we give to a kind of literary taxonomy, an attempt to reduce literature to order along the lines of the major Life Sciences: biology and geology, for instance.

One can certainly waste a lot of time debating whether a particular work falls into one category or another: travel writing or autobiography, for example. On the other hand, it's important to realise that the broad structure of genres does condition readers' expectations of any text they read.

Fictionand Non-fiction, for example: Verse or Prose. These are distinctions which have to be understood if one is to achieve any appreciation of literature at all.

This, then, is the second lecture in a trilogy looking at the creation of "Life Writing" as a genre or category of expression as a result of the growth of Confessionalism in the 60s and the Women's Movement in the 70s and 80s.

"Creative Non-fiction" is another designation for this field incorporating Life Writing, Travel Writing, and what used to be called "The New Journalism" (after Tom Wolfe's influentual anthology of that name from 1973).

What we're looking at today will, however, take the form of another case-study.

I want to talk about the interaction of two creative personalities, two American poets, both close friends - one, Robert Lowell, the Dean of (so-called) "Confessional Poets"; the other, Elizabeth Bishop, a famously reticent and meticulous writer who nevertheless revealed almost as much about her life in her perfectly-crafted, elaborately calculated works.

Robert Lowell & Elizabeth Bishop:
A Chronology

1911 (8 February) - Elizabeth Bishop born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After the death of her father when she was eight months old, her mother had a nervous breakdown and was confined to an asylum in 1916. Bishop was brought up by her grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada.

1917 (March 1) - Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV born in Boston, Massachusetts to a wealthy and influential family. After two years at Harvard, he transferred to Kenyon College, Ohio, to study under Southern Agrarian poet John Crowe Ransom.

1940 - Lowell marries novelist Jean Stafford (they were divorced in 1948). A sufferer from alcoholism and manic depression, Lowell was hospitalized many times throughout his life.

1944-45 - After converting to Catholicism, Lowell becomes a conscientious objector during World War II, and as a result serves several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

1946 - Lowell: Lord Weary's Castle [Pulitzer Prize for poetry].
Bishop: North & South.

1947 - Bishop is introduced to Lowell by writer Randall Jarrell.

1947-48 - Lowell is poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (an office now referred to as "Poet Laureate of the United States").

1949 - Lowell marries the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.

1949-50 - Bishop is poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.

1951 - Bishop travels to South America, settling eventually in Brazil with her companion, architect Lota de Macedo Soares.

1953 - Bishop publishes "In the Village" in the New Yorker.

1955 - Bishop: A Cold Spring [Pulitzer Prize for poetry].

1959 - Lowell: Life Studies.

1964 - Lowell: "The Scream," in For the Union Dead.

1965 - Bishop reprints "In the Village" in Questions of Travel.

1966 - Bishop returns to the United States. Her estranged lover Lota de Macedo Soares follows her there, eventually committing suicide in 1967.

1970 - Lowell leaves Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author Lady Caroline Blackwood.

1973 - Lowell: The Dolphin [Pulitzer Prize for poetry].

1977 (September 12) - Lowell dies from a heart attack in a New York cab on his way to see Hardwick.

1979 (6 October) - Bishop dies of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston.

2008 - Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano & Saskia Hamilton.

[J. L. Castel: Elizabeth Bishop (1954)]

One of the more interesting events in the long relationship between the two poets is perhaps best summed up in this review of the last-mentioned book above, Words in Air, their collected correspondence:

Biographers have investigated in detail the rocky episodes in the relationship of the two poets, chiefly the deep difficulty that occurred over Lowell's use, in his volume The Dolphin [1973], of Elizabeth Hardwick's letters to him during his absence in England with Caroline Blackwood. Bishop had moral objections to the mixture of fact and fiction in The Dolphin, and brought up her heaviest guns to persuade Lowell that he was wrong on all counts. After praising the book as "magnificent poetry," she says (with uncharacteristic capitalization), "I have one tremendous and awful BUT." Against Lowell, she quotes a 1911 letter by "dear little Hardy," in which he said:

What should certainly be protested against...is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons.

"You have changed [Lizzie's] letters," Bishop adds. "That is 'infinite mischief,' I think." She then brings up Hopkins on the idea of a "gentleman," commenting, "It is not being 'gentle' to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it's cruel." She concludes by adducing a letter by Henry James objecting to a roman à clef: "His feelings on the subject were much stronger than mine, even."

- Helen Vendler, "The Friendship of Cal and Elizabeth."
New York Review of Books 55 (18) (20/11/08)

Here are a few more extracts from that famous letter:

March 21, 1972

I've been trying to write you this letter for weeks now, ever since Frank [Bidart] & I spent an evening when he first got back, reading and discussing The Dolphin. I've read it many times since then & we've discussed it some more. Please believe I think it is wonderful poetry. It seems to me far and away better than the Notebooks; every 14 lines have some marvels of imagery and expression, and also they are all much clearer. They affect me immediately and profoundly, and I'm pretty sure I understand them all perfectly (Except for a few lines I may ask you about.) I've just decided to write this letter in two parts - the one big technical problem that bothers me I'll put on another sheet - it and some unimportant details have nothing to do with what I'm going to try to say here. It's hell to write this, so please first do believe I think Dolphin is magnificent poetry. It is also honest poetry - almost. You probably know already what my reactions are. I have one tremendous and awful BUT.

If you were any other poet I can think of I certainly wouldn't attempt to say anything at all; I wouldn't think it was worth it. But because it is you, and a great poem (I've never used the word "great" before, that I remember), and I love you a lot - I feel I must tell you what I really think. There are several reasons for this - some are worldly ones, and therefore secondary ... but the primary reason is because I love you so much I can't bear to have you publish something that I regret and that you might live to regret, too. the worldly part of it is that it - the poem - parts of it - may well be taken up and used against you by all the wrong people - who are just waiting in the wings to attack you. - One shouldn't consider them, perhaps. But it seems wrong to pay right into their hands, too.

(Don't be alarmed. I'm not talking about the whole poem - just one aspect of it.)

Here is a quotation from dear little [Thomas] Hardy which I copied out years ago - long before Dolphin, or even the Notebooks, were thought of. It's from a letter written in 1911, referring to "an abuse which was said to have occurred - that of publishing details of a lately deceased man's life under the guise of a novel,with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers." (Not exactly the same situation as Dolphin, but fairly close.)

"What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorisation, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate."

I'm sure my point is only too plain. Lizzie is not dead, etc. - but there is a "mixture of fact & fiction," and you have changed her letters. That is "infinite mischief," I think.

[...] One can use one's life as material - one does, anyway - but these letters, aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission - IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much. I keep remembering [Gerard Manley] Hopkins's marvelous letter to [Robert] Bridges about the idea of a "gentleman" being the highest thing ever conceived - higher than a "Christian," even, certainly than a poet. It is not being "gentle" to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way — it's cruel.

[...] In general, I deplore the "confessional" - however, when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now - ye gods - anything goes, and I am sick of poems about the students' mothers & fathers and sex lives and so on. All that can be done - but at the same time one surely should have a feeling that one can trust the writer - not to distort, tell lies, etc.

The letters, as you have used them, present fearful problems: what's true, what isn't: how one can bear to witness such suffering and yet not know how much of it one needn't suffer with, how much has been "made up," and so on. [...]

- Elizabeth Bishop. One Art: Letters. Selected and edited by Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994): 561-62.

Perhaps the real politics of this exchange go back a few years, though, to the publication of her story "In the Village" (included in your anthology) in The New Yorker in 1953. She wrote to one friend about it:

I'm nervous about your seeing it. I know I'm not a story writer, really - this is just poetic prose. And completely autobiographical [...] I've just stuck a few years together. Fortunately the aunt most involved in it all - my only nice relative - likes it very much and even corrected some names, and reminded me of this and that. We have equally literal imaginations ... (Bishop, 1994, p.291)

What was her surprise, then, in 1962, to receive a typescript of Robert Lowell's new book of poems For the Union Dead, which included his poem "The Scream" (also included in your anthology):

"The Scream" really works well, doesn't it? The story is far enough behind me so I can see it as a poem now. In the first few stanzas I saw only my story - then the poem took over - and the last stanza is wonderful. it builds up beautifully, and everything of importance is there. But I was very surprised. (Bishop, 1994, p.408)

I suspect that "I was very surprised" was putting it mildly! Later she referred to it as "that story of mine ... Cal wrote a poem on" (431), and emphasised again, to another correspondent - in 1967, after the story had reappeared in her book Questions of Travel (1965) - that "'In the Village' is entirely, not partly autobiographical. I've just compressed the time a little and perhaps put two summers together, or put things a bit out of sequence - but it's all straight fact [my emphasis]" (p.477). So you can see that the subject preoccupied her. And I don't think it's hard to understand why (Lowell didn't - as his own letters on the subject reveal. But that's another story ...)

[Words in Air (2008)]

Quotations from Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano & Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008:

Lowell to Bishop, Letter 244 (March 10, 1962):

... I tried versing your "In the Village." The lines about the heart are Harriet's on her kindergarten society, the rest is merely your prose put into three-beat lines and probably a travesty, making something small and literary out [of] something much larger, gayer and more healthy. I let the scream throw out the joyful clang. Anyway, I send it with misgivings. maybe you could use it for raw material for a really great poem. ... (390)

Bishop to Lowell, Letter 247 (April 4, 1962):

I don't know why I bother to write "Uncle Artie" really. I shd. just send you my first notes and you can turn him into a wonderful poem. he is even more your style than the Village story was. "The Scream" really works well, doesn't it. The story is far enough behind me so I can see it as a poem now. The first few stanzas I saw only my story - then the poem took over - and the last stanza is wonderful. it builds up beautifully, and everything of importance is there, But I was very surprised. (401-2)

Lowell to Bishop, Letter 248 (April 14, 1962):

I was rather on tiptoe that my poems had been intrusive, and read your letter with great relief. ... Glad ... my tampering with "In the Village" didn't annoy you. When "The Scream" is published I'll explain, it's just a footnote to your marvelous story. (405)

Bishop to Lowell, Letter 249 (April 26, 1962):

No - I was very pleased with "The Scream." I find it very touching to think you were worried for fear I might be annoyed. - I thought it was only I who went around imagining people were cross with me when I didn't hear from them. But living here [Brazil} has almost cured me. I just have to give them the benefit of the doubt; think their letters got lost, or mine did. All letter-writing is dangerous, anyway - fraught with peril. (412)

Lowell to Bishop, Letter 300 (June 15, 1964):

... there is no tolerance or place for the unconvinced bystander.

There's a connection between how the world is and what the imagination lights on. What it usually lights on now is some grueling murk or release at all costs. Well, why not? It has always been so. (542)

Lowell to Bishop, Letter 319 (June 15, 1965):

In my classes, I read poems aloud, comment, ramble and ask questions, oh and also listen. The students have either anthologies or mimeographed copes of the poems so there's no question of a performance or declamation. Classes are not lectures so much as arranged conversations, and you need do nothing but take things casually and trust yourself to your humor, sense, knowledge and personal interests. (576)

Bishop to Lowell, Letter 390 (March 21, 1972):

I wish I had here another quotation - James wrote a marvelous letter to someone about a roman a clef by Vernon Lee, but I can't find it ... His feelings on the subject were much stronger than mine, even. (708)
[Footnote: Henry James to William James (January 20, 1893), The Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (1955).]

Lowell to Bishop, Letter 412 (January 24, 1973):

I think a writing course in poetry might be half reading modern poetry. (738)

Lowell to Bishop, Letter 422 (July 12, 1973):

Your old letter of warning - I never solved the problem of the letters, and there and elsewhere of fact and fiction. I worked hard to change the letters you named and much else. The new order somehow makes the whole poem less desperate. And the letters, as reviewers have written, make Lizzie brillant and lovable more than anyone in the book. Not enough, I know . ...

My immorality, as far as intent and skill could go, is nothing in my book. No one, not even I, is perversely torn and twisted, nothing's made dishonestly worse or better than it was. My sin (mistake?) was publishing. I couldn't bear to have my book (my life) wait hidden inside me like a dead child. (752)

Bishop to Lowell, Letter 423 (July 22, 1973):

We all have irreparable and awful actions on our consciences - that's really all I can say now. I do, I know. I just try to live without blaming myself for them every day, at least - every day, I should say - the nights take care of guilt sufficiently. (But for God's sake don't quote me!) (753)

[Words in Air (2008)]

Workshop 8:
Life Studies

[Robert Lowell]

Lecture / Workshop 7

2009-05-16T08:27:00.012+12:00

[Sylvia Plath (1932-1963):
Self-portrait (1951)]

Lecture 7:
Confession or Performance?

[Dr. Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:

Ted Hughes: 'The Rabbit Catcher' & 'The Shot,' from Birthday Letters (1998)
Sylvia Plath: from The Bell Jar (1966)
Sylvia Plath: ‘The Rabbit Catcher,’ ‘Daddy’ & ‘Lady Lazarus,’ from Collected Poems (1981)
Sylvia Plath: from The Journals, ed. Ted Hughes (1983)
Sylvia Plath: from The Journals, ed. Karen V. Kukil (2001)

Tuesday March 24, 2009, 08:26 AM

Son of poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide

LONDON (Reuters) - The son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has committed suicide 46 years after his mother gassed herself, his sister told a newspaper on Monday.

Nicholas Hughes, 47, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, Frieda Hughes, who is also a poet, told The Times.

"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday, March 16 ... He had been battling depression for some time," Hughes said in a statement to the newspaper.

Frieda Hughes, who was reported to be flying to Alaska, could not be reached for comment.

Nicholas Hughes, who was unmarried, had until recently been professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Plath has been at the centre of a literary cult since she committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30 by gassing herself in the London flat while her children, one-year-old Nicholas and two-year-old Frieda, slept.

Plath, famous for her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and the poetry collection Ariel, left bread and milk for the children and sealed their room against the gas. They were unharmed.

Critics blamed Ted Hughes for driving the American poet Plath to despair, and their relationship has been the source of public fascination fuelled by a 2003 Hollywood movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as the troubled couple.

Ted Hughes' lover Assia Wevill also committed suicide in 1969, at the same time killing her young daughter from the relationship with the poet.

He was one of Britain's most distinguished poets and was given the honour of being appointed poet laureate, but Plath's suicide cast a shadow over him until his death in 1998.

(Reporting by Adrian Croft; Editing by Phakamisa Ndzamela)

I guess this tragic story is as good a place as any to begin our discussion of the history (and bodycount) associated with so-called "confessionalism" in literature.

Let's begin with the word "confession" - obviously it has a religious connotations. one of the earliest autobiographies in world literature is the fourth-century The Confessions of St. Augustine, in fact. The idea was to examine the inner parts of a life, the parts hitherto accessible only to yourself, rather than the publically available facts of a life, as recorded in the Emperor Augustus's Res Gestae Divi Augusti [Deeds performed by the God Augustus].

As a literary movement, however, it really came to prominence in the mid to late twentieth century as a result of the confluence of the Beat movement (Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kerouac et al.) on the West Coast, with the East Coast poetry establishment represented by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman.

Lowell saw Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle" (which he read in 1957, long before its publication) as a crucial milestone. He also taught Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in some of his poetry classes at Harvard.

We can construct a very rough chronology of publications as follows:

Allen Ginsberg:
- Howl (1956)
- Kaddish (1961)
Jack Kerouac:
- On the Road (1957)
William Burroughs:
- Naked Lunch (1959)
William Snodgrass:
- Heart's Needle (1959)
Robert Lowell:
- Life Studies (1959)
- For the Union Dead (1964)
- Notebook (1969)
- The Dolphin (1973)
Anne Sexton [suicide - 1974]:
- To Bedlam and Partway Back (1960)
- All My Pretty Ones (1962)
- The Death Notebooks (1974)
Al Alvarez:
- [ed.] The New Poetry (1962)
- The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971)
Sylvia Plath [suicide - 1963]:
- The Bell Jar (1963)
- Ariel (1965)
John Berryman [suicide - 1972]:
- 77 Dream Songs (1964)
- Love & Fame (1970)
Ted Hughes:
- Crow (1970)
- Birthday Letters (1998)

As you see, a good many of these writers didn't actually commit suicide, but there was a tendency in all of them to live in an extreme, razor's edge way, and then write about the results.

Our main case-study here, though, has to be Sylvia Plath (here's a link to a very detailed biography site about her) and Ted Hughes (here's a link to a similarly detailed site about him) - perhaps the most famous poetic couple in literary history.

Sylvia achieved fame after her death, and partly as a result of it. The rest of Ted Hughes's life was dominated by the implication that he was the kind of man who drove his partners to kill themselves (especially after the 1969 suicide of Assia Wevill, the young poet he left Sylvia for in the first place).

It's not so much for us to sit smugly in judgement on these tortured, disordered lives, but more to register just how much we know about each of them - and how much we've had to find out in the course of reading their (largely posthumous) literary legacy.

Could there even be said to be a difference between their literary and actual lives at this point?

Confessionalism may have resulted in some of the most exciting and influential poetry of the twentieth century, but it's also an extremely perilous and addictive literary mode. It's impossible to ignore it altogether, though, when our larger subject is Life Writing and the use of one's life as literary material ...

[Ted Hughes (1930-1998)]

Workshop 7:
Seven

[Seven]

Lecture / Workshop 6

2009-05-15T09:35:00.017+12:00

[Marti Friedlander: Rita Angus (1970)]

Lecture 6:
Case Studies:
The Uses of Life Writing

Panel of Researchers:

Bronwyn Lloyd

I'm a freelance writer and PhD student living in Mairangi Bay in Auckland, New Zealand. By day I write about New Zealand art but my spare time is devoted to making limited edition books for Pania Press, a bijoux publishing company that I co-founded in 2006. You can find the link to our website here.

I'll be talking today about the subject of my Doctoral research, Rita Angus, and particularly the archive of letters she wrote to Douglas Lilburn, which the latter bequeathed to the Turnbull Library at his death. How ethically justified are we in making use of such intensely private materials? More to the point, how valuable are they in interpreting the work of a painter? You can find a link to a presentation I gave on the subject at a Te Papa symposium in 2008 here.

Paul Fenton

Paul started university life as a mature student following work as a Control Systems Technician for a petrochemical company. He completed his BA as a Massey Scholar in Psychology with courses including English, Sociology, and, not surprisingly, psychology. He went to the University of Auckland as a postgraduate psychology student before coming back to lead the Student Learning Centre team at Massey Albany. After spending some time as Retention Manager at a university in Melbourne, he came back to the University of Auckland to complete his honours degree in clinical psychology and neuropsychology, being awarded a UoA Doctoral Student and Top Achievers Scholarship, and starting his PhD while tutoring part-time. Following the birth of his son Dominic, he took on a project management role at Te Wananga o Aotearoa before being enticed back to Massey Albany managing the enrolments, international, retention and scholarships centres while continuing his PhD in psychology (part-time) on the topic of the male experience of miscarriage. He is married to Stephanie, and his son Dominic is 4.

The session today will begin with each of our speakers talking briefly – for 10 to 15 minutes – about a research project they’ve undertaken which involves using either biographical or autobiographical materials (or both). They'll discuss some of the possible pitfalls of this area of study, but will also - I hope - share with us some of the pragmatic strategies they've evolved as a result.

After that we’ll go into a q-&-a session where you can quiz them on the details of the case studies, but also ask their advice on your own research projects.

[McClosky Family Gathering (1965)]

Workshop 6:
Family Gatherings

[1952]

Lecture / Workshop 5

2009-05-14T08:47:00.012+12:00

[Tibetan Oral History Archive (2002)]

Lecture 5:
Oral History / Collecting Data

[Dr. Mary Paul]

Anthology texts to read:

Judith Fyfe & Hugo Manson: from Oral History and How to Approach It (1997)

[Hokianga History]

Workshop 5:
Rules and Taboos

[Rules]

Lecture / Workshop 4

2009-05-13T08:46:00.009+12:00

[Leslie Chang: Factory Girls]

Lecture 4:
Biography (via Autobiography)

[Dr. Mary Paul]

Anthology texts to read:

Leslie T. Chang: 'The Stele with No Name,' from Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China (2009)
Brian Easton: 'The (Economic) Life of Harry,' from The Listener (10 June, 2000: 57)
Xu Zhimo: 'Mansfield,' from A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Shifen Gong (2001)

[April Rhapsody: The Love Story of Poet Xu Zhimo (1999)]

Workshop 4:
Writing a Journal Entry

[James Boswell]

Lecture / Workshop 3

2009-05-12T08:58:00.008+12:00

[Katherine Mansfield (1910)]

Lecture 3:
Memoirs, Diaries

[Dr. Mary Paul]

Anthology texts to read:

Emily Carr: 'Sunday,' from The Book of Small (1942)
Katherine Mansfield: from The Notebooks (1997)
Virginia Woolf: 'A Sketch of the Past,' from Moments of Being (1989)
Laura Alcoba: 'Introduction & Chapter One,' from The Rabbit House: An Argentinean Childhood (2008)

[Virginia Woolf]

Workshop 3:
Questionnaire

[Family Tree]

Lecture / Workshop 2

2009-05-11T07:59:00.007+12:00

[Primo Levi (1945)]

Lecture 2:
Memory

[Dr. Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:

Primo Levi: from If This is a Man (1958)
Marcel Proust: from Swann’s Way (1913)

[Apollo and the Muses]

I'd like to argue that from the very beginning, Memory has been inextricably bound up with the Arts: all the Arts.

The ancient Greeks believed in nine Muses, divine daughters of Zeus, King of the gods, and the goddess Mnemosyne [Memory]. The exact line-up (and even the number) is disputed, but it’s generally thought to be:

Calliope (beautiful speaker): muse of epic or heroic poetry
Clio (glorious one): muse of history
Erato (amorous one): muse of lyric, love and erotic poetry
Euterpe (well-pleasing): muse of music and lyric poetry
Melpomene (chanting one): muse of tragedy
Polyhymnia (hymn-singer): muse of sacred song and oratory
Terpsichore (delighting in dance): muse of choral song and dance
Thalia (blossoming one): muse of comedy and pastoral poetry
Urania (celestial one): muse of astronomy

That's all very well, but what does Memory mean to you? All this talk of muses may sound a bit out of date, really. Let's take another angle on it, then. Here's a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1959:

Italy is My Country

The more days move off into distance
scattering themselves, the more they return
to hearts of the poets. There fields
of Poland, the Kutno plain with hill of corpses
burning in clouds of naphtha, there
barbed wire fences quarantining Israel,
refuse soaked with blood, the fever-pitch uprising,
the chains of wretches dead long ago,
struck down in their trenches dug by their own hands,
Buchenwald is there
that mild-mannered beech wood
with its accursed ovens: Stalingrad
and Minsk with its marshes and rotten snow.
Poets do not forget. Oh hordes of the lowly,
the conquered, those forgiven out of pity!
All things may pass, but the dead do not
sell themselves. My country is Italy,
felt to be alien more than estranged. I sing
the people, also their grief
muffled by sound of the sea, the mothers’
crystal-clear mourning: I sing the life of my country.

Il mio paese è l’Italia (1946)
[trans. Kendrick Smithyman]

[Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)]

"Poets do not forget." There was a good deal that people wanted to forget at the end of the Second World War - were desperate to forget, in fact. His contention, though, is that it doesn't really do any good to try to dismiss things from your mind. You may actually achieve a partial success, but who knows what effect those things are having on you under the surface, on your subconscious mind?

I don't think he means so much to set poets apart as a kind of superior race, but to see the act of poetry and the act of remembrance as synonymous. Poetry may be a way of disciplining and controlling memory, but it depends on it for its validity and power.

I've asked you to read texts by two authors for today: the Italian Primo Levi and the Frenchman Marcel Proust. They could hardly be more different: in background, upbrining, opinions, and literary style. What they do have in common is their obsession with memory, its character and implications.

it's tempting to prefer one to the other: to call Levi clearer, more "honest," perhaps. You may (very legitimately) feel that his memories of the death-camp Auschwitz are worth more than Proust's profound and complex insights into the social positioning of French salon society in the period before the First World War. That's a matter of taste. What I'd like to argue, though, is that too-hasty value judgements may obscure the use of both of these writers to you when you start to make your own series of decisions about how to present your own memories, your own repertoire of perception and experience.

Bibliography:

Se questo è un uomo (1947)
[If This Is a Man (1958) / US: Survival in Auschwitz (1959)]
La tregua (1963)
[The Truce (1965) / US: The Reawakening]
Storie naturali (1966)
[The Sixth Day and Other Tales (1990)]
Vizio di forma (1971)
[The Sixth Day and Other Tales (1990) / A Tranquil Star (2007)]
Il sistema periodico (1975)
[The Periodic Table (1984)]
L'osteria di Brema (1975)
[Collected Poems (1988)]
Lilìt e altri racconti (1978)
[Moments of Reprieve (2001) / A Tranquil Star (2007)]
La chiave a stella (1978)
[The Wrench (1986) US: The Monkey's Wrench]
La ricerca delle radici (1981)
[The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology (2001)]
Se non ora, quando? (1984)
[If Not Now, When? (1986)]
Ad ora incerta (1984)
[Collected Poems (1988)]
L'altrui mestiere (1985)
[Other People's Trades (1989)]
I sommersi e i salvati (1986)
[The Drowned and the Saved (1988)]
Racconti e Saggi (1986)
[The Mirror Maker (1989)]
Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987 (1997)
[Conversations with Primo Levi (1989) / The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987 (1990)]
Opere (1997)
[The Black Hole of Auschwitz (2005)]
[with Leonardo de Benedetti] Auschwitz Report (1946)
[translated into English, 2006]
A Tranquil Star: Stories
[translated into English, 2007]

[Primo Levi (1919-1987)]

À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)
[Remembrance of Things Past (1922-30)]

Du côté de chez Swann (1913)
[Swann's Way]
À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919)
[Within a Budding Grove]
Le Côté de Guermantes, 2 vols (1920/21)
[The Guermantes Way]
Sodome et Gomorrhe, 2 vols (1921/22)
[Cities of the Plain]
La Prisonnière (1923)
[The Captive]
Albertine disparue (1925)
[The Sweet Cheat Gone]
Le Temps retrouvé (1927)
[The Past Recaptured]

[Marcel Proust (1871-1922)]

Workshop 2:
Changes

[In Search of Lost Time]

Lecture / Workshop 1

2009-05-10T08:25:00.008+12:00

[Andrei Codrescu]

Lecture 1:
What is Life Writing? Its History and Scope
[Dr. Mary Paul]

Anthology texts to read:

Andrei Codrescu: 'Adding to My Life,' from Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (1994)
Daniel Defoe: from The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721)
Three Vignettes: from The New Zealand Experience: 100 Vignettes, ed. Brian Shaw & Kathy Broadley (1985)

It is important to note that tutorial allocations will be made at the first lecture.

Tutorials and lectures do begin in week one, so please be sure to be ready for next week's lectures and workshops. This will also entail picking up the course materials from Student Notes in the Quad Block Basement.

Lecture Notes:

Kia ora koutou
Kia ora koutou
Kia ora koutou katoa

Welcome

This is a quite a special course because it not only (like other Creative Writing courses) combines reading and writing – your own creative writing or at least writing that is non-academic, but it also asks you think about/take other people’s lives or your own life as the subject for your writing.

First let’s deal with terms:

Life Writing is a wide term that seems to have been coined (invented) around mid 1920s by the essayist, novelist, writer Virginia Woolf to refer to the widest possible mix of biography, autobiography, memoir etc (she belonged to a memoir club).

Virginia Woolf came from an upper class intellectual background – brought up in Kensington, slummed it by moving to Bloomsbury, friend of prominent figures etc – her father and other relatives wrote biographically but she was using the term to designate some new unknown veracity truth from writing by women who had never seen them selves as subject or important.

So – not necessarily to do with women but term grew out of wanting candour but also finding a way to capture what oneself or someone is like – obsessed with how to express the stream when you are in it. (Quote from Woolf)

If Art and Literature is the search of how to survive in bureaucratic society – or always searching against modernity – them LW is story of those individual lives – outside of fields of expertise –

MP March 2001

[The NZ Experience (1985)]

Workshop 1:
'This is the indelible place you lived in'

[Otara, New Zealand]

Assignments

2009-05-09T08:59:00.018+12:00

[Ashlee Simpson: Autobiography (2007)]

Assessment:

Description: Assignment 1: Journal Entries
Date due: Monday, 29th March
Worth: 20%
Minimum Length: 1500 words

Description: Assignment 2: Short Writing Exercises
Date due: Monday, 26th April
Worth: 30%
Minimum Length: 3 x 1 page

Description: Proposal for Major Project
Date due: Monday, 10th May
Worth: -
Minimum Length: 1 page

Description: Assignment 3: Major Project
Date due: Tuesday, 8th June
Worth: 40%
Minimum Length: 10 + 1 pages

Description: Participation
Worth: 10%
Consisting of: attendance / exercises / contribution to discussion

Presentation:

All the work you hand in should adhere to the following guidelines:
Typed: computer printouts, electric or manual typewriters are all acceptable; handwritten work is not.
1½ or double-spaced text.
Written on one side only of A4 sheets
12 or 14-point type: smaller or larger is unacceptable
Margins at least 2.5 cm (1 inch) all around (including top and bottom)

Submit assignments either in the Assignment slot on level 2 of the Atrium building, or directly to your tutor during the workshop.

[William Wolff: The Oral History Interview (2009)]

Assignment Details:

Assignment 1:
Journal Entries

(20%)

Your journal entries should discuss:

EITHER ONE of the following books or films:

Running in the Family, by Michael Ondaatje
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Bright Star, (movie) directed Jane Campion

The Girl in the Moon Circle, by Sia Figiel
Banana in a Nutshell, (movie) written and directed by Roseanne Liang
In Spring One Plants Alone, (movie) written and directed by Vincent Ward
Rain of the Children, (movie) written and directed by Vincent Ward
Hone Tuwhare: A Biography, by Janet Hunt
Summertime, by J. M. Coetzee
Trust: A True Story of Women and Gangs, by Pip Desmond
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
Blankets, by Craig Thomson (a graphic novel)

OR FOUR of the chapters/extracts from the anthology (the ‘Three Vignettes’ count as ONE chapter)

Your discussion should be arranged as a journal: that is, in a series of entries written over a number of days or weeks including personal responses to the texts you’re reading/viewing, as well as other events in your thinking and daily life which seem relevant.

You should include vivid and detailed comments on how the book or movie is structured and how it handles the problems and challenges of life writing what readers/viewers it is directed to, as well as any other aspects that most interest you.

This assignment is designed to make you more self-aware both as a reader and a writer – the aspects you comment on will help you to make choices in your own writing. Include References in APA or MLA style (available on line).

•

Assignment 2:
Short Writing Exercises

(30%)

Hand in what you consider your THREE best writing exercises. They can be either in the raw form you presented them at the workshop, or rewritten in accordance with the suggestions made there.

•

Proposal for
Major Project

A one-page description of your project for discussion in class or with your tutor. The proposal is due in class on the 10th of May.

•

Assignment 3:
Major Project

(40%)

Present 10 pages of autobiographical or biographical writing (accompanied by a one-page account of what you are trying to achieve and what parts of your work please you most.)

In some cases the project will be 10 continuous pages, in other cases it might be, for example: 3 sections of a childhood memoir, 4 feature articles, the script for one section of a radio documentary or a sequence of 10 poems.

•

Participation

(10%)

Your grade will be based on three considerations, each equally weighted:
Attendance: Perfect attendance will give you a third of the mark. Absences will cost you marks.
Participation: The more constructively and consistently you take part in class discussion and activities, the more easily you will earn these marks.
Preparation: Coming to class with the materials required for each session.

There will be a lot of demands made on your organizational abilities in this course. Think ahead, and come prepared.

Bibliography

2009-05-08T08:38:00.005+12:00

[Encyclopedia of Biography]

Categories:

Course Anthology
Contents
Sources

Supplementary Readings
Contents
Sources

Recommended Books
Primary Sources
Selected autobiographies/biographies
A selection of NZ autobiographies
A selection of NZ biographies
Secondary Sources
Collections of Readings

[Frida Kahlo: The Two Fridas]

Course Anthology

Contents:

3 Vignettes: from The New Zealand Experience: 100 Vignettes, ed. Brian Shaw & Kathy Broadley (1985)
Ballard, J. G.: 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,' from The Day of Forever (1967)
Bilbrough, Norman: 'The Facts of Life: Him,' from Grace (January 2001: 62-64)
Bishop, Elizabeth: 'In the Village,' from Questions of Travel (1965)
Cameron, Miriam: from 60s Chicks Hit the Nineties, ed. Jane Tolerton (1997)
Carr, Emily: 'Sunday,' from The Book of Small (1942)
Codrescu, Andrei: 'Adding to My Life,' from Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (1994)
Easton, Brian: 'The (Economic) Life of Harry,' from The Listener (10 June, 2000: 57)
Fyfe, Judith & Hugo Manson: from Oral History and How to Approach It (1997)
Hughes, Ted: 'The Rabbit Catcher' & 'The Shot,' from Birthday Letters (1998)
Hunt, Janet: 'Green-leaved Anguish,' from Hone Tuwhare: A Biography (1998)
King, Michael: 'The Long Shadow,' from Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)
Levi, Primo: from If This is a Man (1958)
Lowell, Robert: 'The Scream,' from For the Union Dead (1964)
Mansfield, Katherine, from The Notebooks (1997)
Ondaatje, Michael: 'Asia,' from Running in the Family (1982)
Perec, Georges: from W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975)
Pih-Chang, Kathleen: from Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand, ed. Manying Ip (1990)
Plath, Sylvia: from The Bell Jar (1966)
Plath, Sylvia: ‘The Rabbit Catcher,’ 'Daddy’ & ‘Lady Lazarus,’ from Collected Poems (1981)
Plath, Sylvia: from The Journals, ed. Ted Hughes (1983)
Plath, Sylvia: from The Journals, ed. Karen V. Kukil (2001)
Proust, Marcel: from Swann’s Way (1913)
Sexton, Anne: ‘The Double Image,’ ‘For My Lover Returning To His Wife' & ‘The Fury of Overshoes,’ from The Complete Poems (1981)
Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia: ‘Old Man Tuna,' from Tahuri (1989)
Westaway, Jane: 'The Facts of Life: Her,' from Grace (January 2001: 59-61)
Xu Zhimo: 'Mansfield,' from A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Shifen Gong (2001)

Sources:

Ballard, J. G. The Day of Forever. 1967. London: Panther, 1970. 123-26.

Bilbrough, Norman: 'The Facts of Life: Him.' Grace, Jan. 2001: 62-64.

Bishop, Elizabeth. Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. London: Chatto & Windus / Hogarth Press, 1984. 251-74.

Carr, Emily. The Book of Small. 1942. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1951. 3-14.

Codrescu, Andrei, 'Adding to My Life.' Autobiography and Postmodernism. Ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 21-30.

Easton, Brian: 'The (Economic) Life of Harry,' from The Listener, 10 June, 2000: 57.

Fyfe, Judith & Hugo Manson. Oral History and How to Approach It. 1994. Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, 1997.

Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. London: Faber, 1998. 16-17 & 144-46.

Hughes, Ted, ed. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Ballantine, 1983. xiv-xv, 265-67 & 270-72.

Hunt, Janet. Hone Tuwhare: A Biography. Auckland: Godwit, 1998. 11-20.

King, Michael. Frank Sargeson: A Life. Auckland: Viking, 1995.

Kukil, Karen V., ed. The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950-1962. London: Faber, 2001. 428-38.

Levi, Primo. If This is a Man and The Truce. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 1971. 129-36.

Lowell, Robert. For the Union Dead. 1964. London: Faber, 1967. 8-9.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Tornonto; General Publishing, 1982). 17-23.

Perec, Georges. W, or The Memory of Childhood. Trans. David Bellos. London: Collins Harvill, 1988. 63-67 & 149-64.

Ip, Manying, ed. Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand. Auckland: New Women's Press, 1990. 28-49.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1981. 193-94, 222-24 & 244-47.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1966. London: Faber, 1972. 65-76.

Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. 1913. Trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. 48-51.

Scott, Margaret, ed. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. 2 vols. Lincoln & Wellington: Lincoln University Press & Daphne Brasell Associates, Ltd., 1997. 2: 32-33 & 127.

Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems . London: Faber, 1981. 35-42 & 188-89.

Shaw, Brian Shaw & Kathy Broadley, eds. The New Zealand Experience: 100 Vignettes. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1985. 6-7, 17-19.

Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia. Tahuri. Auckland: New Women's Press, 1989. 55-59.

Tolerton, Jane, ed. 60s Chicks Hit the Nineties. Auckland: Penguin, 1997. 33-51.

Westaway, Jane: 'The Facts of Life: Her.' Grace. Jan 2001: 59-61.

Xu Zhimo. 'Mansfield.'A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Shifen Gong. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001. 117-28, 142-44.

[Moll Flanders (2009)]

Supplementary Readings

Contents:

Laura Alcoba: 'Introduction & Chapter One,' from The Rabbit House: An Argentinean Childhood (2008)
Leslie T. Chang: 'The Stele with No Name,' from Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China (2009)
Bilbrough, Norman: 'The Facts of Life: Him,' from Grace (January 2001: 62-64)
Daniel Defoe: from The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721)
Virginia Woolf: 'A Sketch of the Past,' from Moments of Being (1989)

Sources:

Alcoba, Laura. The Rabbit House: An Argentinean Childhood. Trans. Polly McLean. London: Portobello Books, 2008. 1-15.

Aitken, G. A. 'Introduction.' Moll Flanders, Everyman's Library. London: J. M. Dent, 1966. vii-xiii.

Chang, Leslie T. 'The Stele with No Name.' Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China. London: Picador, 2008. 120-70.

Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders . 1721. Everyman's Library. London: J. M. Dent, 1966. 7-51.

Woolf, Virginia, 'A Sketch of the Past.' Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. Grafton Books,. London: HarperCollins, 1989. 72-83.

[The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)]

Recommended Books

Contents:

Selected autobiographies/biographies

Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. London: Fourth Estate, 1998.

Burroughs, William. Junky. 1953. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Hong-Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Keenan, Brian. An Evil Cradling. London: Vintage, 1992.

Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997. (Available Auckland City Central Library)

Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. London: Faber, 1959.

Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Ed. and introd. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984.

Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. London: Little Brown, 1994.

Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. London: Hutchinson, 1966.

Morton, Andrew. Diana, Princess of Wales. London: Michael O’Hara, 1993.

Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking, 1987.

Wadler, Joyce. My Breast: One Woman's Cancer Story. New York: Addison-Wesley,
1992.

A selection of New Zealand autobiographies

Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. Myself. Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1968.

Baxter, Archibald. We Will Not Cease: The Autobiography of a Conscientious Objector. London: Gollancz, 1939.

Crump, Barry. The Life and Times of a Good Keen Man. Opotiki: Barry Crump Associates, 1992.

Davies, Sonja. Bread and Roses. Auckland: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1984.

Frame, Janet. To the Is-land. London: The Women’s Press, 1983.

Hyde, Robin. A Home in this World. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984.

Ireland, Kevin. Under the Bridge and Over the Moon. Auckland: Random House, 1998.

Park, Ruth. A Fence Around the Cuckoo. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1992.

A selection of New Zealand biographies

Bellich, James. I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand 1868-9. Wellington: Allen & Unwin / Port Nicholson Press, 1989.

Binney, Judith. Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki. Auckland: AUP / Bridget Williams Books, 1995.

Challis, Derek, & Gloria Rawlinson. The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde. Auckland: AUP, 2002.

Edmond, Martin. Autobiography of My Father. Auckland: AUP, 1992.

Gustafson, Barry. His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon. Auckland: AUP, 1991.

Horrocks, Roger. Len Lye: A Biography. Auckland: AUP, 2001.

Howe, Kerry. Singer in a Songless Land: A life of Edward Tregear. Auckland: AUP, 1991.

King, Michael. Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame. Auckland: Viking, 2000.

Munro, Jessie. The Story of Suzanne Aubert. Auckland: AUP and Bridget Williams Books, 1996.

Salmond, Anne. Amiria. Wellington: Reed, 1976.

Walker, Peter. The Fox Boy: the Story of an Abducted Child. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.

Secondary Sources:

Atkinson, Robert. The Life Story Interview. (Qualitative Research Methods. Vol. 44). London: Sage, 1998.

Birren, James E., et al., eds. Aging and Biography: Explorations in Adult Development. New York: Springer, 1996. [305.24 Agi]

Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Chamberlain, Mary, and Paul Thompson, eds. Narrative and Genre. London: Routledge, 1998.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. [306.01 Wri]

Conway, Jill Ker. When Memory Speaks: Exploring the Art of Autobiography. NY: Vintage, 1998. [Albany 808.066 92 Con]

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. 2nd ed. NY: Oxford UP, 1998 [1st ed. 1981].

Ely, Margot, et al. Living by Words: On Writing Qualitative Research. London: Falmer, 1997. [808.042 On]

Flinn, Juliana, Leslie Marshall, and Jocelyn Armstrong, eds. Fieldwork and Families: Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research. Honolulu: U of Hawai`i, 1998. [Albany 306.0995 Fie]

Fyfe, Judith, and Hugo Manson. Oral History and How to Approach It. Revised. Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, 1997. [Albany 907.2 Fyf]

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Ballantine, 1988.

Howarth, Ken. Oral History. Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998. [Albany 907.2 How]

Hutching, Megan. Taking History: A Short Guide to Oral History. Wellington: Williams, 1993. [Albany 907.2 Hut]

Jalongo, Mary R., and Joan Isenberg. Teachers’ Stories: From Personal Narrative to Professional Insight. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. [Albany 920.0071 Jal]

Josselson, Ruthellen, ed. Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives. (The Narrative Study of Lives. Volume 4). London: Sage, 1996. [Albany 155 Eth]

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. New York: Ticknor, 1984. [809 Mal]

Manhire, Bill, ed. Mutes and Earthquakes: Creative Writing Course at Victoria. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997.

Manhire, Bill, and Karen Anderson, eds. Spectacular Babies: Creative Writing Course. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001.

McCooey, David. Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. [Albany 820.949 2090 4]

Metzger, Deena. Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992.

Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thompson, eds. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge, 1998. [Albany 907.Ora]

Rosenwald, George C., and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-understanding. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. [920 Sto]

Runyan, Willian M. Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. [155. Run]

Selling, Bernard. Writing from Within: A Guide to Creativity and Life Story Writing. 1988. Alameda, CA: Hunter House, 1998.

Singleton, John and Mary Luckhurst. Creative Writing Handbook. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Swindells, Julia, ed. The Uses of Autobiography. London: Taylor 1995.[Albany 809.93592 Use]

Collections of Readings:

Divakaruni, Chitra, ed. Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. [Albany 808.0427 Div]
Excerpts, grouped by themes such as beginnings, love, homes, learning experiences, language. Indicates rhetorical modes such as narration, description, illustration, argumentation. Has discussion questions.

Ihimaera, Witi, ed. Growing Up Maori. Auckland: Tandem, 1998.
Collection of personal narrative essays.

Ip, Manying, ed. Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand. Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1990. [Albany 305.8951094 Hom]
An example of oral history – 8 stories – by a woman who teaches in the U of Auckland’s Asian Languages and Literature Department; her translation of taped interviews in Chinese; tried to keep them in the women’s own words, did edit, rearrange, and provided background material.

Ross, Jack, ed. [your name here]: Life Writing. Introduction by Mary Paul. ISBN 0-473-09551-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2003. [Albany 823.3 You]
A collection of pieces submitted as assignments in the first two years of the Albany Life Writing course - highly recommended for prospective students.

Ross, Jack, ed. Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2. Introduction by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-473-09551-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2005. [Albany 823.3 Whe]
A collection of pieces submitted as assignments in the second three years of the Albany Life Writing course - highly recommended for prospective students.

Ross, Jack & Kathryn Lee, eds. Home & Away: Life & Travel Writing 3. Introduction by Kathryn Lee. ISBN 978-0-473-13539-3. Massey University: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. [Albany 823.3 Hom]
A collection of pieces submitted as assignments in the past couple of years of the Albany Life Writing and Travel Writing courses - highly recommended for prospective students in either area.

Shaw, Brian, and Kathy Broadley, eds. The New Zealand Experience. Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1985. [306.0993]
Collection made by teachers at Massey U, who invited students in their course in Human Development over 1982, 1983, 1984 to submit personal life-story vignettes. Arranged in a loose life stages’ sequence.

Shaw, Brian, and Judith Loveridge. The New Zealand Experience: A Second Collection. Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1991. [306.0993]
Collection includes more painful, sometimes violent, experiences.

Ward, Martha C., ed. A Sounding of Women: Autobiographies from Unexpected Places. Boston: Allyn, 1998. [Albany 305.40922 Sou]
Seven excerpts of women’s autobiographies, including an Fox Indian (Native American), Japanese Samurai, Egyptian (prisoner), Chinese, Cuban, Muslim Hausa, Maori (Amiria Manutahi Stirling), etc. Introduces each piece with context, follows it with commentary, eg. on the ethnographer’s voice that comes through as well; recommends other books from that culture. Has questions for discussion.

Course Timetable

2009-05-07T09:19:00.013+12:00

[Mind Hacks: Time (2005)]

2010

Semester 1 (22/2-28/5/10)

Lecture:

Mon 10-11 am [QB1]

Workshops:

Mon 11-1 pm [QB1]
Tues 2-4 pm [AT7]

Week 1

Mon (22/2): Lecture 1
What is Life Writing? Its History and Scope [Dr. Mary Paul]

Texts:
Andrei Codrescu: 'Adding to My Life,' from Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (1994)
Daniel Defoe: from The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721)
Three Vignettes: from The New Zealand Experience: 100 Vignettes, ed. Brian Shaw & Kathy Broadley (1985)

Workshop 1: 'This is the indelible place you came from'

Week 2

Mon (1/3): Lecture 2
Memory [Dr. Jack Ross]

Texts:
Primo Levi: from If This is a Man (1958)
Marcel Proust: from Swann’s Way (1913)

Workshop 2: Changes

Week 3

Mon (8/3): Lecture 3
Memoirs, Diaries [Dr. Mary Paul]

Texts:
Emily Carr: 'Sunday,' from The Book of Small (1942)
Katherine Mansfield: from The Notebooks (1997)
Virginia Woolf: 'A Sketch of the Past,' from Moments of Being (1989)
Laura Alcoba: 'Introduction & Chapter One,' from The Rabbit House: An Argentinean Childhood (2008)

Workshop 3: Questionnaire

Week 4

Mon (15/3): Lecture 4
Biography (via Autobiography) [Dr. Mary Paul]

Texts:
Leslie T. Chang: 'The Stele with No Name,' from Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China (2009)
Brian Easton: 'The (Economic) Life of Harry,' from The Listener (10 June, 2000: 57)
Xu Zhimo: 'Mansfield,' from A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Shifen Gong (2001)

Workshop 4: Writing a Journal Entry

Week 5

Mon (22/3): Lecture 5
Oral History / Collecting Data [Dr. Mary Paul]

Texts:
Judith Fyfe & Hugo Manson: from Oral History and How to Approach It (1997)

Workshop 5: Rules and Taboos

Week 6

Mon(29/3): Lecture 6
Case Studies:
The Uses of Life Writing [Panel of Researchers]

Workshop 6: Family Gatherings

Journal Due (Monday, 29th March)

Week 7

Mon (19/4): Lecture 7
Confession or Performance? [Dr. Jack Ross]

Texts:
Ted Hughes: 'The Rabbit Catcher' & 'The Shot,' from Birthday Letters (1998)
Sylvia Plath: from The Bell Jar (1966)
Sylvia Plath: ‘The Rabbit Catcher,’ ‘Daddy’ & ‘Lady Lazarus,’ from Collected Poems (1981)
Sylvia Plath: from The Journals, ed. Ted Hughes (1983)
Sylvia Plath: from The Journals, ed. Karen V. Kukil (2001)

Workshop 7: Seven

Week 8

Mon (26/4): Lecture 8
Genre [Dr. Jack Ross]

Texts:
Elizabeth Bishop: 'In the Village,' from Questions of Travel (1965)
Robert Lowell: 'The Scream,' from For the Union Dead (1964)

Workshop 8: Life Studies

Exercises Due (Monday, 26th April)

Week 9

Mon (3/5): Lecture 9
Subversion [Dr. Jack Ross]

Texts:
J. G. Ballard: 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,' from The Day of Forever (1967)
Georges Perec: from W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975)

Workshop 9: Life Distortions

Week 10

Mon (10/5): Lecture 10
Politics of Lives [Dr. Mary Paul]

Texts:
Norman Bilbrough: 'The Facts of Life: Him,' from Grace (January 2001: 62-64)
Anne Sexton: ‘The Double Image,’ ‘For My Lover Returning To His Wife' & ‘The Fury of Overshoes,’ from The Complete Poems (1981)
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku: ‘Old Man Tuna,' from Tahuri (1989)
Jane Westaway: 'The Facts of Life: Her,' from Grace (January 2001: 59-61)

Workshop 10: Discussing Proposals

Proposal Due (Monday, 10th May)

Week 11

Mon (17/5): Lecture 11
Writing a Biography [Janet Hunt]

Texts:
Janet Hunt: 'Green-leaved Anguish,' from Hone Tuwhare: A Biography (1998)

[No Workshop]

Week 12

Mon (24/5): Lecture 12
New Zealand Life Stories [Dr. Mary Paul]

Texts:
Miriam Cameron: from 60s Chicks Hit the Nineties, ed. Jane Tolerton (1997)
Michael King: 'The Long Shadow,' from Frank Sargeson: A Life (1995)
Kathleen Pih-Chang: from Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand, ed. Manying Ip (1990)

Workshop 11: Sharing Writing

Major Project Due (Tuesday, 8th June)

Course Requirements

2009-05-06T08:25:00.010+12:00

[Sample Executive Biography]

Paper Objectives

The paper aims to:

Introduce the theoretical basis of life writing
Improve the student’s understanding of how personal and non-fictional narratives contribute to New Zealand’s cultural history
Develop the student’s skills for reviewing and recording oral history
Develop the student’s skills and techniques for writing biography and autobiography
Develop the student’s creative writing skills

What am I expected to do each week?

You will attend one hour-long lecture and one two-hour workshop every week.

To prepare for the lecture, you should read the texts from the Course Anthology that are prescribed for that particular session (for further details, see the Course Timetable).

For the second part, the workshop sessions, you will be asked to bring along your writing ‘homework’ and be prepared to discuss it with other students. Their responses to your writing, as well as comments on features such as structure, word choice, condensation, and imagery will help you to revise and edit your work and to decide on the direction of your major project.

Attendance at both lectures and workshops is compulsory. A roll will be taken at each workshop and a clipboard will be handed around at lectures. Make sure that you sign this, as it is the only record of your attendance. More than four unexplained absences may be taken as grounds for failure in the course.

Who will be teaching on the course?

The Course Convenor is Dr. Mary Paul. Mary will be taking the workshops, and sharing the lectures with Dr. Jack Ross. Other experts in the field will also contribute lectures. A panel of researchers from different disciplines will take part in a panel discussion on the ethical ramifications of Life Writing, during which they will outline particular examples from their own experience. Your work will be marked by your workshop tutor.

How will your work be assessed?

You will be graded not on the quality of the experience or feelings you describe in your writing (whether poetry or prose), but on:
how well it meets the assignment requirements
how effective it is as a piece of writing
the clarity with which you communicate the ideas lying behind your work

Presentation and grammar are also very important. Hastily thrown-together, sloppily formatted work is unlikely to achieve a good grade.

Grading of creative work can be particularly sensitive. If you disagree with a mark, we suggest that you wait for a few days before talking to us about it. Give yourself that much time to reread and reflect on the grade and the comments. If you still have a query or complaint after that, you should consult your tutor first of all. If you are still dissatisfied, you can get in contact with the course controller.

What is good lecture etiquette?

All lectures and workshops begin at on the hour and continue till ten to the hour.
Please be punctual. If you arrive late, try to take a seat as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.
If you know you will have to leave early (for whatever reason), try to inform your lecturer of this in advance. Avoid disruption to other students by sitting at the end of a row. Try to close the door quietly as you go out.
If you are expecting an urgent phonecall and need to keep your cellphone on, you must clear this with your lecturer in advance. Otherwise, all cellphones should be turned off at all times. If you forget, and it rings by mistake, don't answer it.
Don't talk unless there's a class discussion underway. Make sure your remarks are addressed to the group as a whole, not your immediate neighbour.

What are the protocols (or Kawa) of a workshop?

Liz Allen in The Creative Writing Handbook (1996) suggests “six ground rules”:

Observe silence when writing in a workshop – creative thought is impaired by superficial conversation.
Always try to write as much as possible in then given time – the movement of the pen on the page sometimes produces material you had no idea was there. You are not just working with the conscious mind.
Don’t be too self-conscious about the work produced – it’s raw, waiting to be worked, you’re not trying to prove anything.
Be supportive of each other, be constructively critical, not negative.
Do not use the workshop as an opportunity to show off technical virtuosity – it intimidates other people.
Do not refuse to read your work out week after week or it will become an increasingly frightening prospect.

To these I would add one other: make no introductions to or apologies for the piece of work you are reading out. Let it speak for itself.

Late Assignments

All work is due in workshops on the dates given in the Course Timetable.

Late work, without an extension, will incur a penalty of one mark per day.

If it is more than one week late, your tutor may refuse to accept or grade it.

Extensions

If you want an extension, you must ask for one from your tutor. They will be given sparingly, in cases of bereavement, illness or “family crisis.” You will be asked to provide medical certificates for illness.

You must ask for the extension before the assignment is due.

E-mail Communication

Under no circumstances will e-mailed electronic texts of assignments or exercises be printed out for you by your tutor or lecturer, or by the school secretaries.

Under no circumstances are you entitled to ask for address details for other students, either individually or on a group-list.

E-mail should be used only:

to request an extension on an assignment.
NB: This may or may not be granted. You are not guaranteed a favourable response.

to explain an absence from class.
NB:You must provide a medical certificate if it is health-related. If you fail to provide a satisfactory excuse, it will continue to be counted against you as an unexplained absence.

to establish the date of completion of an assignment.
NB: A hardcopy must always be handed in to the Department as well.

Plagiarism

We take plagiarism extremely seriously. If you take all or part of someone else’s work without acknowledgement and present it as your own, you can expect to receive – at the very least – a zero grade for that assignment.

Depending on the seriousness of the offence, you may also face failure in the course as a whole.

If in doubt, ask. Not only your words, but also the plots and ideas you employ must be your own unaided work.

[Lady Typist]

Course Description

2009-05-05T12:48:00.005+12:00

[Peter McDonald: Autobiography (1876-79)]

The very process of writing, because of its privacy, and concreteness, forces understandings. Yet everyone can do it. And it is so gentle, despite the fears, hesitations and uncertainties that often accompany it.
- Gillie Bolton and Morag Styles in The Uses Of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells (London: Taylor, 1995): 197.

What is Life Writing?

Life writing includes autobiography and biography in many modes. For example, autobiographical writing includes:

family and childhood memoirs;
accounts of life by well-known identities such as writers, sports people or politicians, or those who have lived through extraordinary times;
confessional writing, including poetry;
political testament – accounts of persecution;
certain types of travel writing;
accounts of ‘rapture’ and spiritual experience;
and even essay writing.

Many different media are also involved: examples of prose, poetry, performance, radio programme, interviews, film or television, newspaper features may all be described as autobiographical.

One of the attractions of autobiography is our sense of access to a real person who has recorded their actual feelings and experiences. Yet, we are also aware that that most people’s memories can be both fallible and inventive (patched together from stories they have been told and ‘filled in’), and that an autobiographer uses similar rhetorical devices to a fiction writer.

And we also sometimes speak of ‘autobiographical fiction,’ fiction based around the author’s life story.

Some historians and theorists suggest that autobiography and the novel are both genres based around interest in interiority and the self, and are closer than is generally realised - there is not necessarily ‘a clear distinction between the confession and the novel’ (James Clifford & George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986: 235).

Another issue which arises in thinking about life writing is how much is someone a ‘product of their time.’ But is the life of a person a window on the times, or the times a window on the life of a person? This is a matter which is always paradoxical because, as one theorist writes in a paraphrase of the philosopher, Kant:

Concepts of the outside world without self-observations are empty: self observations without concepts (of external reality) are blind. (Clifford & Marcus, 1986, 166).

There are also many kinds of biography and many different ways of writing, or compiling, biography. Examples include:

book accounts of public figures or memorable family members;
magazine profiles;
historical writing based around key figures;
anthropological and psychological studies;
evidence given in a court room;
documentary biography on radio or television;
poems and dramatic monologues

Questions of how to balance author’s commentary and quotation from original sources are always to the fore in biography, as are questions about causality – why he or she acted in the way they did. Also important are ideas or assumptions about the relationship between individuals and history.

And, often, as with autobiography, we as readers question the motivation of the author as we read. Why is he/she interested in this person? What is he/she showing us? It is also often said that a biographer must like the person they are writing about. It is true too, in a broad sense, that all writing will be a product of the biographer’s present – the biographer is bound to focus on aspects that are significant to her/him in her own time.

What about Studying Life Writing?

To produce biographical or autobiographical writing you do not need to study the whole of the history of these genres or to define them definitively. In this course you will

Read extracts and books in order to identify how writers produce exciting and engaging writing that resonates for you as readers, and also to find models for the kind of life writing you want to produce.
Attend lectures discussing examples of, and ideas about, life writing.
Carry out regular writing exercises, and practise giving and receiving constructive criticism.

Welcome

2008-04-14T09:02:00.012+12:00

[M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands]

Welcome to 139.226: Life Writing at Massey Albany.

This year, 2010, the course will be taught by Dr. Mary Paul (course coordinator). There will also be guest lectures by Dr. Jack Ross and other speakers in the course of the semester.

So what exactly does Life Writing consist of? Here's what's up on the Massey University website:

Paper Number:

139.226

Paper Title:

Life Writing

Credit Value:

15 credits

Calendar Prescription:

A theoretical and practical study of the nature of life writing, including oral history, biography, and autobiography, personal memoirs and family history.

Pre and co requisites:

None

Semester:

Semester 1

Campus:

Auckland (Albany)

Mode:

Internal

E-Learning Category:

None (no web component)

Paper coordinator:

Dr. Mary Paul
School of Social and Cultural Studies
Atrium Building Level L2.35
Albany Campus
Phone: 414 0800 x 9064
Email: m.paul@massey.ac.nz

Timetable (internal only):

The timetable for lectures, laboratories, and tutorials can be found at http://publictimetable.massey.ac.nz/

Learning Outcomes:

To introduce the theoretical basis of life writing;
To improve understanding of how personal and non-fictional narratives contribute to New Zealand's cultural history;
To develop students' awareness of processes for researching human subjects for the writing of biography in related disciplines;
To develop skills and techniques for reviewing and recording oral history;
To develop skills and techniques for writing biography and autobiography;
To develop creative writing skills

Major Topics:

To produce biographical or autobiographical writing you do not need to study the whole of the history of these genres or to define them definitively. In this course you will read extracts and books in order to identify how writers produce exciting and engaging writing that resonates for you as readers and, to find models for the kind of life writing you want to produce; attend lecture/seminars discussing examples of, and ideas about life writing; and carry out regular writing exercises and practice giving and receiving constructive criticism.

For this first seminar/lecture hour you will usually be required to have read an article or extract. For the second part, the workshop sessions, you will be asked to bring along your writing 'homework' and be prepared to discuss it with other students. Their responses to your writing, as well as comments on features such as structure, word choice, condensation, and imagery will help you to revise and edit your work and to decide on the direction of your major project.

Assessment Proportions:

Internal Assessment: 100%.

Description of Assessment Activities:

Assessment of creative work is difficult and also sometimes quite sensitive as students may be writing about personal material. Assessment, then, will not be based on your 'topic,' but on how effective your composition is in the mode or style that you choose.

ASSIGNMENTS:

Title: Journal Entries
Worth: 20%
Date due: 29/3/10
Min Length: 1500 words

Title: Short writing exercises
Worth: 30%
Date due: 26/4/10
Min Length: 3 x 1 page

Title: Proposal for major project
Worth: 0%
Date due: 10/5/10
Min Length: 1 page

Title: Major Project
Worth: 40%
Date due: 4/6/10
Min Length: 10 + 1 pages

Title: Participation
Worth: 10%
Consisting of: attendance / exercises / contribution to discussion

Due Dates / Deadlines:

The due dates for assignments (and any other internal assessment components) will be advised at the start of each semester.

Penalties for late assignment submission:

Deduction of one mark per day. Tutors are note required to mark work which is more than one week late, except by prior arrangment.

Assignment turnaround:

Two weeks.

Any specific requirements for passing the paper:

Weekly attendance at lecture and workshop.
Completion of assignments as above

Principal Textbook:

Course Anthology, available from Students Notes in the basement of Quad B.

Three volumes of Life Writing by former students in the course are available from the School of Social and Cultural Studies office (Atrium level 2) for $10 apiece. You can find details of each of these books here.

A bibliography of recommended further reading is available here.