Our major goal in this class is to explore the ways storytellinghelps give meaning to our lives by shaping our collective and personalpast, present, and even future. In order to talk aboutAmerican history, we will need to struggle with the issue of what makesus American, what cultural contexts we share, and what the religious, philosophical,political, or psychological stories are that form our collective memory. Underneath it I have listed names, my reasons to write. I write tosave my dead. I got a lot of dead.
Books are a small gesture toward the full story.
We will explore how writing saves the dead and how reading can do thesame, how the things we remember and don't remember and the stories we tell about our pasts and futures reveal our sense of who we are and whatour place in the world is. Our tools for thisproject will be diverse and span several disciplines. Literary narratives will be the center of our inquiry into memory, identity, and history, but we will also use art, politics, history, science, poetry, and criticism to help us find our way through the tangled threads thatconnect individuals with each other and with their shared history throughliterature. I will ask for volunteers to share answers to begin class discussion. Everyone must hand in TEN of these short assignments.