ENGL 151
Lying About the Truth: Writing about Autobiographical Writing Fall 2023
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

The goal of this course is to teach you how to write a clear, well-argued, intelligible and interesting analytical paper. We will spend most of our class time actively engaged in a variety of techniques to improve your critical reasoning and analytical skills, both written and oral. Though the skills you learn will be applicable to other disciplines, and a central purpose of the course is to improve all aspects of your writing, this is a literature class, designed partly to prepare you for upper level courses in the English Department, so we will, therefore, spend equal time on the interpretation of literature, in this case, contemporary American autobiographical fiction. All readers fall prey to it: the autobiographical fallacy–the conflation of author and narrator. Writers know readers are susceptible to it. A course designed to explore the uses and abuses of the autobiographical fallacy by contemporary American authors. How do writers of autobiographical fiction take advantage of this tendency? What role does the autobiographical play in a writer’s authority? What’s the relationship between reader and writer in autobiographical writing? What do writers of such fiction want from a reader, and how does encouraging the autobiographical fallacy get them what they want? Reading list may include: Tim O’Brien, Yiyun Li, Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nam Le, Dorothy Allison, Ocean Vuong.