Life Stories
Course Description
Summary
This course will focus on reading and analyzing a variety of autobiographical writing forms as well as perfecting your written French through creative autobiographical writing. Literary readings will offer both a critical perspective on a wide variety of autobiographical genres as well as models for inspiration and imitation in your own writing. We will also examine style and register while striving to master some of the stylistic and grammatical difficulties which confound even native speakers. Workshop sessions will allow students to present each othersʹ work in a critical workshop setting. Intermediate‐high level.
Learning Outcomes
- Understanding autobiographical writing as an artistic practice of self-fashioning that allows for self-expression while also communicating a vision of the self, society, narrative, and truth.
1. Expanding the student’s understanding of the resources of genre through examination of the autoportrait, the essay, the mémoire, the sonnet, les formes brèves, the confession, la bande dessinée, and auto-fiction, etc.
2. Examining how autobiographical literature has become the prized contemporary form for investigating questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity in the Francophone world.
Prerequisites
Instructor's permission: intermediate-high French level. First-year students will be placed at an appropriate level based on their previous study of French.
Please contact the faculty member : sshapiro@bennington.edu
Corequisites
Enrollment in second-seven weeks course: Texts in Transit: Translating from French to English