Course description and goals
Biographers construct narratives that aspire to do two
things: represent another person's life, and make that life represent something beyond
itself - a historical period, a social group, or a particular kind of achievement
(admirable or otherwise). We'll practice the techniques biographers use to transform into
a coherent whole the diverse and often contradictory materials of biography - letters and
diaries, media reports and previous biographies, gossip and government records, the fond
(but sometimes misleading) memories of friends and the malicious (but occasionally
illuminating) accounts of enemies.
In the first half of the quarter, we'll develop a toolkit
of narrative strategies, using as models biographies ranging from traditional "grand
narratives" (Quentin Bell) to exercises in ironic deflation (Lytton Strachey) to
postmodern foregrounding of the fragmentary nature of biographical evidence (Simon Schama,
Richard Holmes). In a series of written exercises, we'll apply two kinds of techniques
from the readings to biographical source materials such as letters or contemporary
newspaper reports. First, we'll practice constructing the various part/whole relationships
on which biography depends: we'll focus narratives by selecting details that speak to a
central theme; we'll represent longer units of time by selecting particular moments (or
hours or days or years); we'll develop portraits of individuals by describing objects and
places associated with them. Second, we'll practice narrative techniques that control tone
and can imply judgment: we'll shape the narrative by deciding where to begin and end;
we'll mediate between subject and reader by developing a narrative persona; and we'll
convey the subject's "voice" by switching among third-person narrative,
quotation, indirect discourse, and out-and-out impersonation.
In the second half of the quarter, students will work
outside the classroom to research and write a short biographical narrative on the subject
of their choice, offering periodic in-class reports on the research problems they face.
We'll emphasize the political and social implications of the narrative choices students
make in their final projects by comparing in class short readings from
"competing" biographies of three figures - Marcel Proust, Sylvia Plath, and Anatole Broyard
- who have sparked controversies over the nature and goals of biographical
narratives.
