ENGL 174CA: LIT&MIND - SELF I

University of California, Santa Barbara

This course follows a genealogy of confessional and autobiographical writin g in the West, from Rousseau's tussles with the concept of authenticity to the playful auto-fictional experiments by authors such as JM Coetzee and Sh eila Heti. It traces how the western self's confidence in its capacity to a rticulate its own truth, or to ‘confess,’ was progressively undermined — f irst by the emergence of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious mind, and more recently by the science affect and memory — and characterizes the rise of auto-fiction as a creative response to the demise of secular confe ssion, one that incorporates and thematizes the precariousness of our belie fs about authenticity, creativity, truth, and the very idea of the self.