In confession we create the self. Confession is premised on truth – ultimate truth, the truth that exposes everyday truth as pretense, pose and mendacity. To create a confession is to create a new self: a self cleansed, reborn, redeemed. To create a portrait built entirely on the pretense of ultimate truth demands an entirely other category of lie. The “true life” confession – generally a tale of dysfunction, alcoholic, chemical, sexual – and the ancillary pursuit of exposing its accompanying falsehoods, is arguably our most popular form of contemporary literature. These constructions, from confession to memoir to autobiography, have their own traditions and we will seek to analyze and trace them in this seminar, while now and then trying our hand at a bit of self creation. Readings will be drawn from, among others, Augustine, Rousseau, Franklin, Newman, Mill, DeQuincey, Adams, Stein, Lawrence, Kafka, Levi, Nabokov, Harrison, Malcolm, Eggers, Karr and Richards. Along with the reading there will be some constructing of confessions, truthful, mendacious and fanciful. 

Self Creation: Confession, Memoir, Autobiography

English 165, Spring 2012,  Wheeler TK, Monday 3 – 6 pm

Mark Danner

mark@markdanner.com

Main Class Requirements: This is a seminar – a discussion class – which means the success of the class depends on student participation. The most important requirements of the seminar are that students

Attend all class sessions

Participate in discussions

*Do all reading and writing assignments

A student’s record of attendance and participation in class discussion, together with the thoroughness of his or her preparation, will determine the success of our class and contribute the better part of the grade. The remainder of the grade will come from the writing assignments.

Writing. We will be undertaking a number of short papers, for which you are meant to draw on the assigned reading and on class discussions, and a longer final paper. To bolster the clarity and vigor of your English prose, I strongly suggest reading two works: George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and White’s little manual, The Elements of Style. 

Reading. This seminar has a heavy reading load, consisting mostly of at least one book a week and sometimes two. If you are accustomed to catch up on required reading at the end of the semester do not take this seminar. Required books for the class can be obtained at Analog Books, on Euclid Avenue at the north end of the Berkeley campus. Some suggested readings will be distributed in class or via the internet.

Schedule. Note that all classes will take place on Monday afternoons, 3 to 6 p.m., and will be divided at about the halfway point by a fifteen-minute break. We will meet in Wheeler TK. The first class will meet on Monday, January 23, 2012, at the usual time and place. Note also that because we lose several Mondays because of holidays – including Martin Luther King Day and President’s Day – the seminar will have its final meeting on May 7, at the usual place and time.

Rough Syllabus

Following is a rough outline of the course and an indication of the assigned reading. Please note that the schedule and the readings associated with it are subject to change.

January 23, 2011 – Introduction: Confession and the Creation of the Self

January 30, 2011 –  Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss: A Memoir (Random House, 2011 [1997]). 256

February 6, 2011 – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis [1905] in Weintraub and Aldington (editors), The Portable Oscar Wilde (Penguin, 1981), pp. 508 – 659. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (Harcourt, 1985), 196

February 13, 2011 – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (Harper, 2006 [1971]), 288, Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Vintage, 1995) 224

February 20, 2011 – President’s Day, NO CLASS

February 27, 2011 – St. Augustine, Confessions, translated by Garry Wills (Penguin, 2008 [398 AD]), 388

March 5, 2011 – Peter Abelard, “The Calamities of Peter Abelard” and “Letters of Abelard and Heloise” in [Historia Maladia], in William Levitan (editor), Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings (Hackett, 2007 [c. 1130 AD]), pp. 1-47, 47-247.

March 12, 2011 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, translated by J.M. Cohen (Penguin, 2005 [1789]) 

March 19, 2011 – Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession” and “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence,” in Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings (Penguin, 1988), pp. 17-80, 151-230. 

March 26, 2011 – Spring Break, NO CLASS

April 2, 2011  Frederick Douglas, Notes of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Modern Library, 2004), 120, James Baldwin, Notes of A Native Son (Beacon, 1984 [1955]), 32

April 9, 2011 – Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Penguin, 2003), 86, William Burroughs, Junkie: 50^th Anniversary Definitive Edition (Penguin, 2003 [1953]), 166

16 April 11 – Franz Kafka, Dearest Father (Oneworld, 2009). 128, Franz Kafka, The Sons (Schocken, 1989), 189, J.R. Ackerley, My Father and Me (NY Review, 1999 [1968]) 240

April 23, 2011 – Primo Levi, Survival In Auschwitz (If This Be A Man) (CreateSpace, 2011 [1947]), 170, Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (Schocken, 1995 [1975] ) 240

April 30, 2011 – Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (University of Wisconsin, 2002 [1981]), 176

May 7, 2011 – Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Vintage, 2001)