Personal Memoir Syllabus

Whenever I work on a syllabus, I always have some amorphous idea for a theme and for the texts I want to use in the course. For introductory composition courses where the goal is to teach students to write argumentative essays and move towards the incorporation of sources into their work, I always structure the course around personal narratives because, for me, starting by writing about ourselves tells us about who we are as individuals and provides us with a foundation to look outward to others. I think about Lillian Smith in these instances. In a letter to Horace Kallen in 1954, Smith wrote, “When I want to find something, I write a book. It is my way of searching. Not to give the world ‘answers’ but to find them myself.”

Writing, specifically a writing where we center ourselves in the writing, allows us to discover the world around us through our grasping and clawing as we search for “answers.” Those answers aren’t always what we seek or what we desire, but they tell us about who we are and what we think. They tell us about how we view the world. They expand our understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit. For this reason, I structure my introductory composition courses around personal narratives.

When thinking about texts for this semester, I wanted to do memoirs instead of individual essays. So, I chose two memoirs by musicians and artists and two by academics…