From the Puritans onward, Americans have relied on biographies and memoirs to give our culture order and direction. This course explores the uses of exemplary lives at different moments in American history, looking in particular at the changes in these stories in the last twenty years. Are we still a culture that looks to biography for instruction and beauty? How has technology altered the way we use lives-often quite ordinary lives-to understand ourselves and to shape the culture we inhabit? Materials for the course will include such traditional forms as the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men, as well as the films of Errol Morris and Ross McElwee, and the radio essays of Ira Glass. Requirements: three short critical essays, and two exercises in biography: the first a brief personal memoir, the second an audio portrait. Students will also be required to participate in a series of seminars with film and audio essayists.
No prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 28.