Writing The Self

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Tutor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: a 5000-word creative-critical assignment - either a creative piece and a critical essay, or a hybrid creative-critical piece (100%)

Literary non-fiction is enjoying a surge in visibility and popularity, with memoir, personal essay and lyric essay reaching a wide readership, garnering critical acclaim and winning prizes. Texts that have recently received attention include Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a lyric essay exploring transgender identity; The Lonely City, Olivia Laing’s meditative book on a cluster of mostly gay male artists associated with New York City; Eula Biss’s On Immunity, an erudite and personal essay on infection and motherhood; and Katherine Angel’s formally inventive hybrid text, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell.

In this module we will teach you the craft of good literary non-fiction in the first person, exploring the formal, narrative and ethical questions these texts raise, and put these texts into dialogue with critical and theoretical writings exploring the stakes in writing about the self, identity and subjectivity. We will explore political questions of power, community, speech, responsibility and identity-formation, questions vital for writers to engage with as they explore the creative content, form and voice of their own writing. On whose behalf are they writing? Who are they writing for? What subjectivity can they access and mine when writing from their own lives, given the challenge of Freud and Foucault in particular to notions of the self and truth-telling about that self? Exploration of these questions, alongside detailed attention to technical questions, will help you develop a rigorous approach to an important literary form.

Indicative syllabus

• Introduction: memoir and the self
• Writing about disability and illness
• Writing about race
• Writing about sexuality
• Writing about gender
• Exile, migration, belonging
• Depression
• Language
• Writing about grief

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• demonstrate a familiarity with a range of important contemporary memoirs, lyric essays and personal essays
• demonstrate a familiarity with some key theoretical concepts (from psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, queer theory, critical race theory) that interact with, challenge and reshape the technical and formal questions the memoir-writer must ask about notions of the self
• engage critically with familiar accounts and critiques of memoir
• recognise the distinctive fruitfulness of putting critical and theoretical writing into dialogue with your own writing craft 
• make connections between the form and content of a critique through reflection on critical texts.