How to say Babylon is, in many ways, a straightforward and traditional memoir. It is a classically structured Bildungsroman–a story of education and growth, a portrait of the artist as a young person. It’s a story that easily absorbs its reader into the tale of its protagonist as we feel and see and taste the world through the eyes of the narrated self.
But the story is alo deep and complex, and the concepts in Reading Autobiography Now offer a range of keys that help us unlock some of these complexities.
When we start a new book in this class, I first like to hear initial responses that likely have nothing to do with intentionally applying key concepts from Reading Autobiography Now: the beauty of a sentence, the visceral reaction to a key scene, an authorial reflection that we felt took on a notable weight, a narrative detail that we understood to be of primary importance.
Your first task in this reflective engagement is to simply share a quote from one of those moments and jot down some ideas you might share about why you chose that quote, that moment.
Your second task is to share a second quote from How to Say–one that has everything to do with intentionally applying a concept from Reading Autobiography Now: something about autobiographical subjects like memory, relationality, experience, identity, spatiality, embodiment, and agency; or about autobiographical acts such as coaxers, sites, autobiographical I’s, voice, structuring modes of self-inquiry, patterns of emplotment, archives, and paratextual apparatuses. Please also bring in a relevant quote from RAN to help frame your second selected quote from How to Say.