Approaches to Genre: The Novel

The genre of autobiography is often assumed to offer faithful mimetic representations of individual life stories. In the West, it is generally thought to be characterized by a post-enlightenment sense of interiority or self-reflexion, considered a requirement of the genre. Through a survey of the genre’s central critical texts and examples of life-writing from both the Western and Arabic literary traditions this course will examine the biases we have when reading texts that offer a different portrait of selfhood than that found in the Western canon. The first part of this course will address the following questions: How has Rousseau’s canonical text shaped the way we read autobiography? How have the generic expectations set after the Enlightenment distorted our reading of Augustine’s work to create a false typology of autobiography’s historical development? How have our own cultural assumptions obscured the rhetorical strategies at work in the autobiographical text’s construction? If we adjust our own “horizon of expectations,” can we disprove the oft-repeated claim that Arabic autobiography before the twentieth-century did not exist? The second part of this course will explore how the genre of autobiography has been used in the Arab world in the twentieth-century to reconstitute the marginalized subject. Topics considered will be the generic difference between autobiography and the bildungsroman, Arab women’s autobiography, the autobiography of exile, the autobiography of the socially and economically disenfranchised, and the role of autobiography in the uprisings and revolutions generally referred to as the Arab Spring. Authors will include Saint Augustine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, al-Gahazali, Ibn ‘Ajibah, Taha Hussein, Leila Abouzeid, Assia Djebar, and Mahmoud Darwish among others.