English 353 - Readings in Literary Biography

Biography is both a literary genre and a mode of literary scholarship. This course will explore some varieties of the biographical impulse in both fiction and nonfiction. We will begin with eighteenth-century British models: Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets and James Boswell's Life of Johnson. Then we will turn to ideas of biography and literary portraiture in the work of Henry James and Gertrude Stein. We will explore the shift associated with the advent of Freud and the Bloomsbury innovations of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, and with close attention to recent experiments in biography by writers such as Janet Malcolm, Rachel Cohen, and Richard Holmes.

This course is open to Juniors and Seniors.; Prereq: 8 credits from the department beyond Engl-101.