Department of English

​​This is a course for anyone who has ever kept a diary, or a blog, or tried to write in essays or letters how they feel about their life. What is an examined life? And how might this change with the old and new media we have at our disposal? We’ll begin early, with Augustine’s Confessions, and move through a range of reading from correspondences, diaries and essays. Authors will include Montaigne, James Boswell, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti, author of our titular text, How Should a Person Be? The reading for this course will be expansive but pleasurable. However, participation in the course will be partly by way of writing. All students will build a portfolio of life writing (this will include keeping up a journal, blog, vlog, or working on a personal essay), as well as writing a conventional essay about one or two of the texts we read. The grade for the course will not depend on the quality of your creative portfolio but on your willingness to think about a life as something that can be grasped and shaped in different ways by representation.