21W.022: Reading and Writing Autobiography

Spring 2022

Carlisle

Essay #3: Mapping Autobiography

Overview

In this final writing assignment for our class, you will build upon both the narrative and analytical skills you have been developing in writing and revising an autobiographical narrative and a personal investigative essay. Your task will be to tell another story drawn from your life experiences.   For this essay, however, you will enrich your narrative essay with a visual source or sources. This source could be one or more of the following:  map, mathematical figure, photograph, a sketch of an object of any kind, a sequence of drawings like one might see in a graphic memoir or novel.   Our readings will once again serve as both inspirations and models for style and structure. Oliver Sacks’ autobiographical essay “Persistence of Vision,” in which he includes his own drawings, offers a particularly good example of how one can integrate visual images into autobiography in a way that adds interest and dimension to the story. We will also analyze and discuss how other writers—such as Dorothy Allison, Roz Chast, Scott McCloud, and Alison Bechdel, along with several MIT student authors—combine a variety of images and graphics with the written word. Whatever you choose to write about, you will find that this assignment lends itself to both storytelling and reflection as well as to experimenting with narrative structure.

Reading, Writing, and Speaking

We will begin this unit with three in-class exercises that will help you generate ideas for a topic in the form of a catalogue of things, a mapping exercise, and a page of sequential simple drawings.   As a class we will read excerpts from a few graphic memoirs  and analyze how the writers use visual images and techniques to tell a story. Applying some of Scott McCloud’s ideas in Understanding Comics will help us figure out how to analyze images and scaffold a narrative in both linear and non-linear ways, which can add complexity and power. When you have determined what you want to write about, you will write a short proposal for your project and deliver this proposal as a one-minute oral presentation during which you will show us the visual(s). In class we will also talk about how one deftly integrates and cites visual sources such as figures, charts, tables, artistic images, and movies in academic writing.