Traceable Beginnings: Reading and Writing Memoir in the First-Year Humanities Classroom

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the process one teacher and her university students undergo as they study the reading and writing of memoir in the context of a course titled, ‘Truth-telling in American Culture’. Exploring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, engaging the critical tools of introspection and revision, Blumberg parses the links that might be forged between personal memoir and historical understanding. Building reading and composition skills via a technical vocabulary for narrative allows students in all fields to see more independently, whether they are considering their own pasts or the social and political world they currently inhabit.

KEYWORDS:

• Memoir
• narration
• truth
• humanities
• introspection
• revision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Ilana Blumberg is author of the prize-winning memoir, Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books (U Nebraska P, 2007), and Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels (Ohio State UP, 2014). She is Director of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, where she also teaches literature.

Notes

1. See “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (White 81–100), for a helpful synopsis of these key elements of White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

2. Gornick (2002) offers an adept, non-technical discussion of the narrating persona that is accessible to beginning students.

3. For a discussion of ways to avoid a simplistic distinction between the narrated ‘I’ and narrating ‘I’, see Smith and Watson (71–79). For the purposes of first-year students, however, the distinction is nonetheless the critical one.

4. I have changed the names of students, and occasionally an identifying detail, in order to protect their privacy. Any identifying details that I have not changed have been permitted by the students in question.

5. I spoke in class on the basis of an excellent article by Sommers (378–388).

6. Here, I am thinking of the pioneering work of Suzanne Keen. Keen argues persuasively that reading literature is not itself necessarily productive of empathy or positive social action. However, reading in the context of a classroom with a teacher ably facilitating discussion has a very different threshold for such effects: ‘In the culture wars, books, including novels, apparently possess extraordinary persuasive and motivational power, but without passionate teachers (parents, librarians, and other book lovers) even classics remain inert[ … ]. The affirmation and challenge to convictions that can occur when readers discuss fiction, especially with the guidance of a teacher who connects the dots between reactions to fiction and options for action in the real world, can be considerable’ (146).