Undergraduate Course: Modern and Contemporary Life-Writing (ENLI10410)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores some of the most aesthetically innovative and ethically challenging works of life-writing including literary autobiography, memoir, and autofiction, among other forms from the late nineteenth century to the present. |
| Course description |
Taking as a point of departure Henry James's explorations of the ethical stakes of biographical inquiry and the literary life, the course traverses the long twentieth century to explore the ways in which writers have transformed lives - their own and those of others - into narrative art, from modernist experiments (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Vladimir Nabokov), through memoir as act of witness and testimony (James Baldwin, Primo Levi), through to wide-ranging contemporary reformulations, whether in the form of graphic memoir (Alison Bechdel) or controversial acts of exposure (Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard). Following a broadly chronological trajectory, each session spotlights a specific theme, issue or sub-genre in life-writing (family history, nature memoir), inviting inquiry into the life-writer's navigation of self and other in relation to historical and cultural contexts.
The course will involve weekly ALG meetings as the basis for short student presentations, and seminar-based group discussion. Postgraduates will be invited to take part in a workshop to discuss their essay proposals with the course organiser and one other. Detailed information and guidance on the course as a whole and on each week's texts and topics will be available on Learn. Students will be invited to participate in the activities and events organised by the Edinburgh Life-Writing Network alongside the course, and where places are available, postgraduates may be able to apply to read for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography (PhD researchers are given priority). Where possible, the course will involve a contemporary life-writer speaking to the seminar and responding to student questions.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 15 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Undergraduate students will write one coursework essay of 2,000 words (30%), and one final essay of 3,000 words (70%). |
| Feedback |
All students will be given regular oral feedback in response to their contributions in seminars, and to their written Autonomous Learning Group reports and their informal oral presentations of these reports in seminars, throughout the course. All students are welcome to speak with the Course Organiser during office hours or by appointment for individual feedback on their ideas, plans for their assignments, or for further discussion of feedback received on written work.
Undergraduates will receive formative written feedback and a grade (provisional until ratified by the Board of Examiners) within 15-working days of submitting their mid-semester Coursework Essay, which is due as standard in the Department on the Monday after Coursework Completion Week. Students are expected to engage with this feedback as they work on their summative assessment - the Final Essay - and are welcome to approach the Course Organiser to discuss the feedback during office hours or by appointment. Feedback and a grade on the Final Essay, submitted at a departmentally assigned deadline after the Teaching Block, will be provided within 15-working days of submission (the grade is provisional until ratified by the Board of Examiners). |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate an understanding of critical issues in relation to forms of life-writing in modern and contemporary literature.
- Construct informed, clear and persuasive arguments about these issues in relation to the primary texts, and the social, cultural and historical contexts in which they are embedded.
- Present work in an appropriate academic style, informed by research and by discussions in Autonomous Learning Groups and seminars of the relationship between the creative and the critical.
- Critically engage with a range of relevant literary theories, such as genre theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, feminist literary criticism, queer theory, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and bring these theories to bear in analysing the primary texts on the course.
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Reading List
Essential
Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, ed. Adrian Poole. Oxford: OUP, 2013.
Virginia Woolf, Sketch of the Past (1939), in Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002.
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight( 1939). London: Penguin, 2000.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951/1966). London: Penguin, 2000.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1949). London: Beacon Press, 2012.
Primo Levi, If This Is A Man (1958), in Levi,If This Is A Man / The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 2001.
Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (1982). London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006
Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (2012). London: Sort of Books, 2012.
Alison Light, A Radical Romance. London: Fig Tree, 2019.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Students will
develop skills in research and enquiry through engaging with a wide range of life-writings and their contexts, navigating a growing, interdisciplinary research field, making use of the facilities and resources available at the University
exercise their personal and intellectual autonomy through active engagement in Autonomous Learning Groups, seminar discussions, and through developing guided but self-determined research topics for their summative assessment
enhance their skills in communication, oral and written, through engaging with others in the course, informed by close engagement with texts in which the negotiation between self and other is centrally at issue |
| Keywords | autobiography,biography,auto/biography,memoir,travel,witness,testimony,identity,memory,sel |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Simon Cooke
Tel: (0131 6)51 3996
Email: Simon.Cooke@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: pgordysh@ed.ac.uk |
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