ENGL1012: Narrative Construction of the Self

Debate Question #1: Should Public Colleges and Universities in America be Tuition Free?

Here are your partners for your 250-word Tumblr peer commentaries for the Autobiographical Essays. You must write one commentary for each partner. You will reblog your partner’s essay post, and then post your commentary along with it. Commentaries are due on Tuesday before class. They must be constructive and considerate. You might choose to discuss a few of your partner’s points, or discuss the larger theme of their essay. You might choose to discuss structure, style, diction, tone or another element of writing. Remember these essays are personal and autobiographical; we’re not critiquing our peers’ lives, but instead how they choose to tell these stories and what larger themes or narratives emerge.  

List:

These essays don’t adhere to the guidelines for your autobiographical essays, so don’t use them as models for your papers. Rather, use them for inspiration and ideas on what sort of stories you may tell, and what aspects of your life you may want to explore in this first major assignment for our class.

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom

Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

Zora Neal Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me

Sarah Smarsh, The Shame of Poor Teeth

http://www.lexwilliford.com/MM/Dybek%20We%20Didn't.pdf

We Didn’t by Stuart Dybek

“At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.

Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.”

-Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress 

“I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the John, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven. 

But there was a fight. I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. 

A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.”

-Denis Johnson, Work

Brownies by ZZ Packer

http://www.westga.edu/~cshelnut/Brownies.pdf

You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore