3.0

credits

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This course will examine fictional works that pose as memoirs or autobiographies, which is not a genre unique to the twentieth century but which rose to prominence in the modern period as a result of historical developments. We will consider the aesthetic presuppositions that gave rise to the novel and culminated in the great realist narratives of the nineteenth century that claimed to do nothing less than represent real life situations. Novels such as Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, Bernhard’s Auslöschung, Beckett’s Malone Dies, and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians call these assumptions into question by focusing on the inner life of a hero who lives only in writing and writes to live. Fictional autobiographies provide a fertile ground for reconsidering such issues as what it means to tell a story and whether life takes the form of a story, which have gone unaddressed in narrative theory.