ENGL2292

THE STORY OF MY LIFE: TEXTUAL SELVES

Offered: SEMESTER 1, 2008 (for the last time. This unit is no longer taught.)

'I am a story' declares a character in Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves. In this unit students consider the processes by which the 'self' is constructed in a variety of written and visual texts and examine how these texts themselves shape our experiences and subjectivity. Students question the familiar idea that the 'life story' is a transparent window on a living subject and consider why works which are not obviously autobiographical may borrow this genre's claim to an authority of experience, and with what effects. Informing these interests is the conviction that texts which seem most concerned with the individual and the personal offer powerful insights into the society in which they are set and have a great deal to tell us about gender and the ways class, race and sexuality are implicated in gendered constructions. Using a range of the theoretical perspectives available in literary and gender studies the unit invites students to engage with some of the complex questions about how subjectivities are represented. For example: How is our own reading experience mediated by discourses of the 'self'? How is a politics of subjectivity expressed in such writings? What discourses does writing about the self call on and how might they be explored and interrogated? What are the social effects of so-called 'life writing' in particular historical and cultural contexts?