Seminar Master Winnett Mi 10:30-12:00 findet nicht statt wegen Forschungsfreisemester

-Memoir: personal history; the personalizing of history; the historicizing of the personal. Memoir: the personal act of repossessing a public world, historical, institutional, collective. … The memoirs are of a person, but they are ‘really’ of an event, an era, an institution, a class identity.” Francis Russell Hart’s formulation of memoir’s self-situation between the personal and the public, between the apparently trivial events of individual lives and the apparently important events in the world ‘out there’ suggests why the memoir has become such a popular form of life-writing in the past 50 years. Becoming a -first person” seems to involve a making space for one’s own memories and one’s adult understanding of them in relation to those people who were there ‘first’: one’s parents. In this seminar, we will focus on memoir as a family genre, while also discussing writers’ and graphic artists’ attempts to negotiate between individual self and the other people, historical events, and social practices to which the s/he senses or discovers him- or herself to be related in complicated, often devastating, sometimes liberating ways. By exploring the characteristics of memoir as a genre, and discussing how it lends itself to explorations of identity construction, we will examine how the self emerges through its engagement with the world and its shifting and discordant discourses. Readings are likely to include: Ruth Klüger, weiter leben, Edward Said, Out of Place, Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation, Marjane Satrapi Persepolis, and Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something Else? as well as selected studies of autobiography, memoir, life writing, and first-person narration. I am presuming that members of the seminar will already be familiar with Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II. Requirements will include an ILIAS reading journal, a short personal memoir, and a final paper. Englisch Comp. Stud. Engl. Amer. (Master, PO 2011) Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2017 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Winnett Susan