Rationale for readings

ENG 482, Life Writing, Spring 2009

I’ve always believed that assigning a small number of books, to be read and re-read carefully, is better than packing a syllabus with a text every week. To that end, we have only nine books and a handful of essays to read this semester.

Even though we have a small number of texts, I wanted to select a variety of approaches and subjects. That wasn’t very hard. The real challenge was length: biographies are often longer than I like. For example, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father is 480 pages; but that’s less half the length of Bill Clinton’s My Life, which is over 1,000 pages! It’s not that I fear long books; rather, I prefer to read and re-read, and go more in-depth in our discussions. And I’m a firm believer in William Zinsser’s assertion that the encyclopedic approach to life writing isn’t wise. Better to establish a focus, and write a second book if there’s demand, than create a 1,000 page epic nobody has the patience to finish.

We’ll begin the semester with “The Legend of Master Legend,” an essay from a recent issue of Rolling Stone. We’ll also read some articles which discuss research processes relevant for writing biography, such as interviewing and archival work.

I wanted to assign a few theoretical books, but didn’t want to weight the course too heavily with theory. That’s why Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life appealed to me; I knew Zinsser’s other work, and his combination of life writing and analysis looked interesting. Carl Rollyson’s Biography: A Users’ Guide isn’t titled very well—I expected it to be more like a textbook and less like a dictionary—but it has the broad scope I wanted.

When I saw that Maya Angelou had a new book out, I jumped on it; I’ve always thought highly of her work, and the format appealed to me. Years ago I read Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; I’ve been looking for a chance to return to that work, in which Barthes (a literary and cultural theorist very important to me) writes an autobiography considering himself as a text. David Banash suggested Evasion; it appealed to me because the approach is so different than any of the other texts included here, and I think we can learn from its mistakes as well as its successes.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is one of many “year in the life” texts which are on the bestseller list now. (Indeed, there are multiple books about food which use the year-in-the-life approach.) This genre may or may not be here to stay, but it’s popular enough that I thought we should consider it. I also wanted to include a book which wasn’t, strictly speaking, a biography.

The obvious exception to the “variety of subjects” rule is the trio of texts on Johnny Cash. I thought this would facilitate comparison—we can consider the way Cash, Streissguth, and Mangold handle similar events and subject matter. Streissguth’s approach, mixing interviews with prose, sounded interesting. Though I hoped to find a subject of greater historical importance, the books about Cash are the right length, were written recently, —and the accompanying film is a nice bonus.

What didn’t make the list? Lots... instead of Cash, I thought about reading two “competing” biographies, such as right- and left-wing takes on Clinton or another politician. I also considered orienting the course more strongly around films, but decided to leave that for other courses. It was very easy to build a long list of biographies which looked interesting, from religious leaders to professional wrestlers. As always, making the final cuts isn’t easy, and I hope the selections I’ve assembled work out.