Memoir and Ethnography: Understanding Culture Through First-Person Narrative

Catalog description

Memoir is the best-selling genre in contemporary literature. Indeed, our fascination with all things autobiographical attests to the importance of examining one particular life in order to understand larger issues concerning culture, community, race, gender and even social and global transformations. Narrative Ethnography is also a form of writing which uses the first person pronoun. In this genre, "participant observation" - actually experiencing the beliefs, rituals and life-ways of another culture first hand - is the methodology employed in order to explicitly understand not just the self, but the 'other'. What are the differences between memoir and ethnography? What kinds of knowledge travel in each? How does writing in the first person challenge other modes of knowledge production? How might memoir and ethnography contribute to our understanding of cultural and cross-cultural dialogue, while providing a post-colonial critique? In this course we examine the rhetorical and aesthetic rules that govern these genres, as well as the way they create social imaginations that go on to live political lives in the world.