Writing: Life and Story

  Seminar In this seminar, we explore some of the very different ways writers have used material from life as a source for stories. How do writers transform personal experience into imaginative writing? How do a writer’s memories become a work of fiction? What is the difference between the self who narrates an event from the past and the self who actually lived through it? How is it possible for a work to be autobiographical and anti-autobiographical at the same time, or for confessional writing to avoid narcissistic self-absorption? Among the writers whose work will be discussed are George Orwell, Colette, J. R. Ackerley, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Stafford, J. G. Ballard, Leonard Michaels, Annie Ernaux, Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Lydia Davis.