First-Year Research Sem: Truth or Fiction?

Catalog description

The academic field of scholarship in “memory studies” is booming; new memoirs (for example, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy) continue to appear on best-seller lists. We seem to be reckoning with how memory frames the stories we tell about our lives and ourselves, and how stories we tell ourselves about the remembered past, in turn, shape us as individuals, groups, and nations. At the interface of individual memory, cultural and collective memory, and political and social formations of narrative, lies a process of interpretation and manipulation—the process of writing. This course will explore how memories are "written" on the printed page (or the screen) in order to help students sharpen their own writing. The process of writing a series of critical papers over the course of the semester will serve as background for the final research paper addressing some aspect of memory and its framing through story. Readings and film will include Plato, Tawada, Freud, hooks, Borges, Woolf, Duras, Modiano, Machado, and Ernaux.