This course centers around "Autobiography, Media, and Culture."
The course is set up as a
collective problem-solving adventure. The purpose of the course
will be to explore the way
that autobiography foregrounds and problematizes issues of
subjectivity. We will use the texts in each
section as theoretical relays; that is, we will ask: what
kind of a "self," if any, does this
text promote? Does the text buy
into the idea of an essential self or does it suggest we are
socially constructed, fragmented
"selves" (or both)? Where does the "real world" come into play
here, and how do these texts
comment upon recent post-structuralist theory which often
contends (implicitly or explicitly)
that there is no such thing as a unified self or a "real" world?
Similarly, how do these texts
fit in the debate that there is no Transcendental Signified?
On a material level, the course will foreground the technology
of
the lab, using the texts as design relays as well. That is, we
will
read/view many different kinds of autobiographies--print and
film, non-fictional and fictional,
traditional and untraditional, recent and "historical"--and we
will ask: what are the
features/strategies of these
autobiographies? We will further inquire, though: what do these
autobiographies suggest
about what an electronic autobiography might look like?
We will not read these works in hopes of discerning what they
"mean"; rather, we are more concerned with developing a
rhetoric/poetics of what they do. Thus, our "texts" will
be the
sources of the "instructions" for our final project, the
"Electronic Mystory."