Life Writing: A New MALS Track
The Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program (MALS) began offering a new “track” or area of concentration, “Biography, Autobiography and Memoir,” in the fall of 2008. The title reflects special interest in the intersections of those genres and their mutual influences. Their further connections with social and political history, journalism and politics, literary and cultural criticism and theory, and especially with the novel will be explored as students proceed through the introductory core courses and the rest of the degree program. A variety of courses at the Graduate Center will enable and encourage the pursuit of particular interests within this broad and widening area of study.
The two core courses introduce first-year students to memorable and influential articulations of the modern self—e.g., Boswell on Johnson, Rousseau on Jean-Jacques, the collaborative and competitive constructions of Mary Wollstonecraft in her time and after her death. Reading about lives and theories of life writing, they will also consider the kinds and conventions of life writing. Reflecting on the conflicted motives of writers, the confounding of real and imagined lives, and the links among life writers, their subjects and their readers, they will consider themes of gender, race, class and sexuality through the ways that personal and social relationships shape identity. By definition interdisciplinary, this new concentration offers an entry point for students of the humanities and the social sciences interested in the social construction of the self, the relations of a single life to its historical and familial contexts, and changing theories and practices of writing lives. Students will consider the differences between life stories and evocations of persons and personalities, as well as the different stakes of seeing the stories of lives as monuments and imagining the writing of a life as a metaphor. In close readings of a variety of texts, they will note the salience of telling details, moments, words and images.
Moral questions inevitably get raised in this growing field—and perhaps by it, as well. Explicitly or implicitly, life writing tends toward defining the good life and the virtuous individual. Ethical issues are also posed, not only by false memories and falsified memoirs but also by what David Lodge imagines Henry James must have thought of as “the essential depravity of this urge to uncover the secrets of dead authors, to possess their private thoughts and deeds, and to publish them to the world.” (The quotation is from Lodge’s Author, Author (2002), a novel—one of three published around the same time—based on the life of the author of “The Aspern Papers,” a story about an intrusive would-be biographer.)
Core courses will prepare students to take doctoral-level courses in a wide range of disciplines, from art history through psychology and sociology. The Graduate Center faculty includes many eminent biographers as well as scholars and critics in the field, such as André Aciman, Meena Alexander, Mary Ann Caws, Blanche Wiesen Cook, John Patrick Diggins, Wayne Koestenbaum, Gail Levin, Nancy K. Miller, David Nasaw, Suzanne Ouellette, David Reynolds, Joan Richardson, James Oakes and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The new program will also benefit from its proximity to the Leon Levy Center for Biography, a hub for writers, scholars, students and readers of biography that was also initiated at the Graduate Center in the fall of 2008.
For students enrolled in this new concentration, the thesis, which culminates the course of study for the MALS degree, may be a critical study or a memoir or biographical text.
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