Memoir and Anti-Memoir: Experiments in Text and Image

Catalog description

How can text and visual narratives subvert traditional notions of authorship, identity, and autobiography? While traditional memoir and self-portraiture often assume a stable, knowable subject, what happens when the self is fragmented, shifting, or shaped by forces beyond individual control? How can the processes of mark and image-making literally construct, revise, and re-define subjectivity through repetition, revision, and transformation? To investigate these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, this course considers texts and image projects across cultures, eras, locations, and artistic practices that rethink the relationship between personal memory and collective history. Through hands-on experimentation with print-based media—ranging from traditional to contemporary and hybrid approaches—students will develop studio skills while using making itself as a mode of critical inquiry and reflection. The course culminates in a body of printed works that reframe memoir as a collaborative, process-driven inquiry into the relationship between personal and collective histories.