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Worlds of Autobiography English 351:341 William C. Dowling
Who Should Take the Class? The course has previously been a large lecture course. This time (fall semester 2011) it has been designed as a discussion class -- about 30 students -- that will permit close analysis of narratological issues central to an understanding of autobiography as a literary genre. "Worlds of Autobiography" has a limited number of places available for students in fields other than English who would like an opportunity to experience literary study -- the formal analysis of theme, structure, and narrative consciousness in one genre -- before going on to medical school, law school, or graduate programs in mathematics or the sciences. Worlds of Autobiography From the time
of Augustine's Confessions, the central theme of autobiography
has been taken to be "the self as world": the way an
"I" or autobiographical consciousness constructs a
self or stable identity in the midst of change. This is the sort
of autobiographical stucture we find, for instance, in Pepys's
Diary or the journals of James Boswell and Fanny Burney.
It was given classical status in There is, however, another autobiographical structure, much less taught in university courses or studied in the scholarly literature on autobiographical writing. This is autobiography where the "world" of the narrative dominates over the "I." One of the books we'll be reading in this course is Melvin Konner's Becoming a Doctor, which is subtitled, significantly enough, "a journey of initiation in medical school." Here, the real subject of the book is the way medicine in its totality -- from the pre-med studies of a college student to the operating theater where a neurosurgeon is removing a brain tumor -- constitutes a separate "world": a sphere of social reality with its own rules, traditions, taboos, lore, and specialized knowledge. In a certain sense, the "I" of normal autobiographical writing does not exist in this sort of structure: to enter medical school is to leave behind whatever one was in earlier life, to pass through a process of initiation in which a new self is formed by a separate "world" closed to non-doctors, and then to pass out the other end of the process as a new person -- the physician, the trained clinician, the healer -- who did not exist before. Each of the autobiographies we'll read in this course has a similar thematic structure: a "world" -- science, professional sports, law, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, university teaching, and writing as a vocation -- that dominates over the autobiographical "I," asking its readers to trace the process through which a prior self dissolves and a new self is built up within the limits of a separate social, moral, and intellectual reality. What are these "worlds" that exist separate from the "I" of the autobiographical story and "remake the self" when entered into? Hemingway in Paris: World of the Expatriate Writer We'll begin the course with Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, the story of his life in Paris when he was a young and unknown writer, but also someone who considered literature as his vocation, in much the same way as a Konner perceived medical education as a rite of initiation through which students must pass to emerge on the other side as physicians.
Hemingway at the time A Moveable Feast was written. Hemingway's autobiographical account catches perhaps the last moment in American culture when it was possible to consider writing as a profession in the traditional sense: a time when literature occupied a central place in cultural consciousness -- the long pause of Western culture before television and advertising and electronic communication would forever marginalize literary knowledge as a basis of mental or spiritual community -- and in which a Hemingway or a Faulkner or a Fitzgerald occupied the same sort of importance in their society as is today occupied by a Madonna or a Michael Jackson or an Eminem. The "world" that dominates over the "I" in A Moveable Feast is literature as a cultural institution going back through Milton and Shakespeare in the Renaissance to Horace and Virgil in ancient Rome and Aeschylus and Sophocles in ancient Greece. Becoming a Doctor: Medical School as a Rite of Initiation Melvin Konner's
Becoming a Doctor, which in a way was the inspiration
for this course, has a special fascination because Konner, before
breaking off his academic career to go to medical school in his
30s, was already a well-known anthropologist with a tenured Konner's Becoming a Doctor: medical students in training On another level, he is the trained anthropological observer who is used to perceiving peoples and cultures and subcultures like modern medicine as "cultural systems" -- something very close to what we shall mean by "world" in this course -- that have a power to make the individuals inside them into bearers of their own perspective and values. Becoming a Doctor gives a fascinating picture of modern medical training -- it is a book that I have recommended, ever since its publication, to my own students who were planning to go to medical school -- but it also gives an unsparing picture of what is gained and what is lost in the process of becoming a physician: the "necessary brutality" involved in learning to cut into a living human body or treat a patient as less important than the disease whose riddle one wants urgently to solve, the hypocrisy that is taught about "caring" and "sympathy" in a world where real caring and real sympathy would, in a certain sense, make you an incompetent physician. The Double Helix: the World of Nobel Science James Watson's
The Double Helix is the story of the discovery of the
DNA structure -- the arrival of an innocent American youth from
the midwest in an English scientific community (the Cavendish
laboratories at Cambridge) in which people speak differently,
dress differently, and think differently than anyone he knew
in his American life. His account of making friends with Francis
Crick, a physicist-turned-molecular-biologist and himself something
of an oddball in the scientific community of Cambridge, is a
classic of the sort of autobiography in which a "world"
dominates over an unformed "I" to produce a new self. Watson (left) and Crick with their newly-constructed model of the DNA molecule The "I" that emerges from The Double Helix is the young man who, with Crick, would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the DNA structure, and who recreates the story in retrospect as a "race" against Linus Pauling of the Cal Tech labs in the United States. As we now know, the "race to the prize" aspect of the Double Helix is something that was projected into the story by an older Watson -- we will discuss the problem of "revisionist memory" in autobiography as one of the major themes of the course -- but the story as we read it is a scientific thriller, a classic of the subgenre in which the "world" of the narrative dominates over the autobiographical "I." Instant Replay: the World of Professional Sports Instant Replay, the 1967-68 diary of offensive lineman Jerry Kramer, takes us into the world of the 1967-68 professional football season, when the Green Bay Packers, under legendary coach Vince Lombardi, were playing for their third straight NFL championship and second straight Super Bowl. As an account of the world of professional football -- its on-field strategies, the explosive violence of actual play, the injuries and constant pain that are a routine part of competition, the boredom of travel and cheerful banality of locker room humor -- it has never been surpassed. One reason
Kramer's diary has been recognized as a classic is that it takes
readers into a vanished For our purposes, the problem of Kramer's Instant Replay will be an "I" that -- unlike the voices speaking in our other autobiographies -- has been pre-formed long before the narrative begins. Though diary follows the Green Bay Packers through a single eventful season, we get numerous flashbacks of a Jerry Kramer who was an outstanding Idaho high school football player, who went through college as someone for whom football was the dominant reality -- a fact about which, having grown older, he is somewhat rueful -- and who even now, at the age of 31, has never really stepped outside the world of coaches, practice schedules, game films, training meals, and team travel. The central problem we will address is the diary's admiring portrait of Vince Lombardi: does Lombardi emerge as an estimable human being, or simply as a master at manipulating young males who, having never experienced life outside the locker room, are unknowingly imprisoned in a state of perpetual adolescence? Adventures of a Mathematician: the World as Number Stanislaw
Ulam's Adventures of a Mathematician is one of the most
exciting books ever written about the world of higher mathematics
-- an abstract, ethereal, disembodied realm that knows no national
or linguistic boundaries -- as experienced by one of the major
mathematical figures of the 20th century. The story starts in
Poland, with Ulam coming of age in the great period of Polish
mathematical genius -- the story of his meetings with other mathematicians
in a cafe where they did world-class mathematics with a pencil
on the marble top of the cafe table is itself almost a parable
of total dedication to a discipline -- and it ends in America,
at Los Alamos, where Ulam's mathematical genius would play a
major role in solving the theoretical problems involved in making
the first atomic bomb. Original edition of Ulam's Adventures of a Mathematician I know of no book that better communicates what it is like to be a mathematician -- to live in a world where purely abstract thinking is as real, or more real, than the tables and chairs and walls that surround us in ordinary life -- or that provides a better opportunity to discuss our autobiographical theme, the domination of a "world" over the autobiographical "I." What does it mean to live in a sphere of existence in which numbers are a primary reality and all else is secondary, where mathematical reality is "real" in a way that no non-mathematician can directly imagine? Ulam's story comes as close to answering that question as any book I know. Doing Battle: World of an English Professor Paul Fussell's
Doing Battle is a book that takes the autobiographical
"I" from service in World War II combat to Harvard
graduate school in English literature to a career as a Professor
of English at Rutgers. As a Rutgers English professor during
the period when "Rutgers English" was nationally famous,
Fussell would emerge as a major scholarly presence with The
Great War and Modern Memory, a brilliant account of the way
World War I as a cataclysmic upheaval of Western civilization
brought about the climate of bleakness and cynicism in which
literary modernism -- the world of T.S. Eliot's Wasteland
and Ezra Pound's Cantos and Joyce's Ulysses --
was born, changing the nature of literary and artistic expression
forever. Doing Battle: cover shows Fussell as a soldier in WWII and as a Rutgers English professor A special fascination of Doing Battle is the view it gives of traditional literary training at Harvard in the period immediately before the current regime of identity politics, feminist ideology, and Madonna studies. It also shows the Rutgers English department during the period of its greatness. Fussell was considered to be a life-changing teacher by generations of Rutgers English majors; one of the most moving scenes in Doing Battle comes when, having accepted the offer of an endowed chair at Penn, he walks through the vacant classrooms in which he has taught over the years and says goodbye to the invisible Rutgers students whose ghosts he feels still to haunt the space he shared with them. One L: Harvard Law School as Initiation and World Scott Turow's One L is the story of his first year at Harvard Law School -- the "pressure year" during which some people learn that they are going to be stars of the legal profession, the federal judges and Supreme Court justices who will exercise a commanding role in American society, and others that they will never be more than ordinary lawyers -- and the ugliness, and competitiveness, and unexpected sympathy and personal bonding, that are all part of legal education at one of America's premier law schools. In a way,
Turow sums up the theme of our course in the opening pages of
One L. "Not only is it a demanding year," he says of
the first year of law school, "--the work hugely difficult
and seemingly endless, the classroom competition often fierce--but
it is also a time when law students typically feel a stunning
array of changes taking place within themselves. It is during
the first year that you learn to read a case, to frame a legal
argument, to distinguish between seemingly indistinguishable
ideas. . . It is during the first year that you earn to think
like a lawyer, to develop the habits of mind and world perspective
that will stay with you throughout your career. And thus it is
during the first year that many law students come to feel, sometimes
with deep regret, that they are becoming persons strangely different
from the ones who arrived in law school in the fall." Scott Turow as Harvard law student Turow would go on to become a state prosecutor and the author of the bestselling Presumed Innocent, but One L was written when he was, in his own eyes and those of his law professors, just another face among the rows of students sitting in their first-year classrooms studying Torts or Contracts. The Turow who emerges from his first Harvard year is not the later author of bestsellers, but simply the law student as Everyman, someone who has survived an ordeal undergone by tens of thousands of men and women before him, and that will be survived by tens of thousands more in years to come.
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Rousseau's Confessions in the eighteenth century.
A Moveable Feast is dominated by Hemingway's sense of
writing as a vocation, a craft or discipline that must be mastered
by ruthlessly subjecting the mind and spirit to its demanding
rules. The separate world in which the story takes place is the
literary Paris of such expatriates as Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude
Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and the artists and composers
-- Stravinsky, Braque, Picasso -- whose sudden explosion of creativity
has given Paris in the postwar 1920s legendary status.
world
where today's professional sports, a gigantic business sustained
by billions of dollars in TV advertising revenue, are still only
a visible speck on the cultural horizon. Instant Replay,
Richard Lapchick recently said, "is as timely today as it
was twenty years ago. Jerry Kramer puts a frame around the sport
of football when it was played without today's glamour, glitz,
and big business. When I read it twenty years ago I did not want
it to end, and now it doesn't have to. Instant Replay's
honesty is as compelling today as it was then."
