Blog 2: How to Say Babylon
(750 – 1000 words–Due Sunday by 5pm. You may choose either the creative or critical prompt)
Critical Prompt:
How to Say Babylon resonates with so many concepts that we’ve discussed so far: agency, relationality (especially as it relates to family), embodiment, memory, identity, space & spatiality. There are also fascinating things going on within the narrative itself: recurring symbolic patterns, a complex management of various autobiographical “I”s, a sense of address (that is, who are the explicit or implicit addressees here?), and the importance of literal self-reflection (via photographs) and archives. For your blog post, please provide a deeper look into one of these facets of life narration and relate it to a series of moments in Sinclair’s memoir. Please spend at least one paragraph on the theoretical material, and please also feel free to bring in outside ideas and research. For example, research on trauma and forgiveness could be fascinating to explore here.
Creative Prompt:
There are a few moments in How to Say Babylon where Sinclair confronts an image of herself, which immediately introduces critical distance (even if the image viewed was a recent one). One could expand this idea to include moments where Sinclair sees herself from the perspective of others, sort of pinned and framed in a moment. These moments often conflict with her efforts literally re-framing her story (e.g. “I was determined to write myself back into the frame,” 315). In your creative post, please recreate one of these moments of self-estrangement or self-recognition, drawing as well on at least one key concept or idea from Reading Autobiography Now. Creative prompts should also engage the memoir under discussion, connecting the moment in the text to the moment you are relating as a key point of connection. If you have other ideas for creative responses inspired by How to Say, please feel free to run an idea by me!
Blog 1
Engaging Autobiography
(600 – 800 words–Due Sunday by 5pm). You may choose either the creative or critical prompt)
Critical Prompt: This prompt encourages you to sharpen your knowledge about key aspects of autobiographical subjects and acts, and to apply them to a brief personal essay. In your post, please take two concepts from Reading Autobiography Now–one each from chapters on autobiographical “subjects” and “acts”–and use them as a way to address some aspect of Madden’s essay “Against Catharsis.” Please make use of Chapter Five’s helpful toolkit of strategies as an inspiration for your own reading.
Alternatively, you can write about a personal essay of your own choosing. On the LitHub site where Madden’s essay is published, there are a bunch of personal essays categorized under “memoir.” Take a look, peruse some essays, and engage one that you feel drawn to. You can also go rogue here, selecting any kind of life narrative to analyze–a song, a picture, something from your own personal archive.
In your post, please include well-integrated and contextualized quotes from both Reading Autobiography Now and the narrative that you’re writing about (these quotes will not count towards the total word count). Treat your reader not as a fellow member of this class, but as anyone looking for interesting writing on the web. Don’t assume we know the theoretical texts, or the life narrative that you’re citing. You need to introduce us to them.
In your post, please pay attention to document design. Use frequent paragraph breaks, include at least one image or other media form, and incorporate links.
Creative Prompt:
Madden, in her essay, refuses to let her audience be a passive consumer of her text–or worse, a voyeuristic presence witnessing the writer’s pain. Instead, she gives us a throttling image less to heal herself than to invite us to return to and re-imagine our own pasts. “Art is a superpower,” Madden writes, “that allows creator and consumer to be in dialogue regardless of circumstance or logistics or miles, a shared experience, a third plane found when two people meet when seeing one another through the page.” To be more direct, she wants us to “remember [our] own moments as a child on the other side of the glass.” She gives us a memory that, she writes, “is no longe mine. It’s yours.” It’s a stunning reversal, and a strong call or engagement and what the authors of Reading Autobiography would call “relationality.” In your creative post, please take Madden up on her invitation and narrate a moment from your life as a child on the other side of the glass. Please interpret Madden’s scene broadly, as she does: this won’t be a moment of your narrated “I” banging on a car window, of course; it is any moment where any barrier–physical or emotional, vast or minute, real or imagined–led to an indelible memory that you could never shake.
Alternatively, please feel free to share a creative response in relation to another essay that you’ve read, or in relation to a set of concepts–one from each of the chapters on “acts” and subjects”–from our theoretical texts. This response will blend some critical engagement with the concepts with some application to your own life.