Self/Life/Writing

Instructor: Dr. Lawrence Wheeler

Readings for the course

There will be three main texts (Jacob’s The Statue Within, Levi-Montalcini’s In Praise of Imperfection, and Yukawa’s Tabibito [“The Traveler”]), each by a Nobel laureate in the sciences. The Jacob and Yukawa texts are available at the PSU Bookstore; Levi-Montalcini’s autobiography, along with a core critical text that will guide some of our reading (Ch. 1 of Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography), will be available at Clean Copy.

Since we want to think both about autobiography as a formal genre and about autobiographical representation more generally, we’ll also consider such topics as the historical emergence of autobiography, cultural differences in autobiographical representation, and whether the emergence of such self-representational modes as Facebook, Myspace and blogs suggest a different idea of the self.

How the course will run

We’ll start with Jacob, reading it in company with the chapter from Pascal’s Design and Truth. Having, with Pascal’s help, thought through some of the classic problems of autobiography, we’ll consider how Jacob’s text enacts, confronts, expands and undermines the work of self-representation. With In Praise of Imperfection we’ll consider points of both similarity and difference in regard to Jacob. Before we move on to Yukawa’s Tabibito, we’ll confer about the seminar project, a presentation in the last week of the course.